Helen Lewis's Blog

Happy Friday!

Earlier this week, Bluestocking reader Chris chastised me for saying in the last newsletter that it felt as though things were getting back to normal. He was correct to do so; my solemn vow not to have any uninformed opinions on the R0 rate is henceforth reinstated.

This week, I have been reading Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s Left Out, which covers the Corbyn project from the high of 2017’s hung parliament to the low of 2019’s electoral disaster. The book strives to be fair to everyone involved, though it reads to me as though the Seumas Milne/James Schneider axis co-operated less than the Karie Murphy/Andrew Fisher one, and so we see events more from the latter’s POV. As Donald Trump is now discovering, giving interviews to political chroniclers is a fine calculation: is it worth the risk of your mistakes getting airtime to put your side of the story across?

As anyone who covered Labour from 2015 onwards will already know, the levels of backstabbing, bitching and in-fighting are off the hook. Almost no one comes out well, whether you sympathise with their aims or not. The Corbynsceptics, in this telling, played very dirty. The Corbynites were little better.

The book leaves you wanting to understand Keir Starmer better. Here, he is an enigma who operates by dropping policy bombs (such as going on Marr and advocating for a Remain option in a second referendum) without briefing against anyone. I suspect Starmer might be that most horrifying of figures: someone who just gets on with stuff without monologuing like a Bond villain. Someone who doesn’t need to tell you how clever they are while doing something clever is a political journalist’s nightmare. Tactical boringness is a great weapon.

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-413-584 {
padding-bottom: 70.71917808219177%;
padding-bottom: min(70.71917808219177%, 413px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-413-584 img {
max-width: 584px;
max-height: 413px;
}

My longterm problematic fave John McDonnell also emerges with some credit, as a man who really, really wants to get into power and can’t understand why the leadership would do petty and self-defeating things (like getting into a legal battle with Margaret Hodge over anti-semitism) which make that harder.

The black hole at the centre of this narrative is Corbyn. Unlike Starmer, he doesn’t seem tactically boring. He just comes across as stubborn, irritable and incapable of the necessary ruthlessness for leadership or even making basic decisions. He won’t sack people. He can’t decide whether to defenestrate Tom Watson or not. He becomes incredibly, unhelpfully defensive when accused of anti-semitism, seeing it as an attack on his very soul, and so cannot bring himself to apologise on the occasions where he clearly got it wrong (the mural, “English irony”). Finally, he seems overwhelmed by the task of leadership, made miserable by its demands. You suspect he was secretly relieved to lose the election.

The swift marginalisation of those close to Corbyn since April is almost as astonishing as his original rise to power. (That said, Corbynism isn’t dead yet: watch what happens with the trade union top jobs.) Pogrund and Maguire refer constantly to “The Project”, and in their telling, The Project’s two biggest failures were the inability to agree a Brexit position - you suspect that even a bad position would have been better than paralysis - and the inability to find an heir. (Even then, John McDonnell deserves credit, having spent years grooming Rebecca Long-Bailey; he reasoned that the party would decide it was time for a woman. LOL.)

Left Out made me more sympathetic to The Project over the horrorshow of the 2019 election. I suspect there was nothing to be said on Brexit which would have prevented their electoral coalition from splitting: socially liberal graduate Remainers in Zone 2 and working class social conservatives in the Don Valley were impossible to reconcile. And people were tired of Brexit. That’s why it feels dangerous for Boris Johnson to revive the issue by trying to rewrite the Withdrawal Agreement. It’s a road which leads to No Deal, which is not only not what he promised in his manifesto, but an outcome with material consequences. No Deal would ensure that Brexit impinges on people’s lives in the form of higher food prices and irritating paperwork. Sorry, didn’t you promise to get that done?

Anyway, can’t believe I’ve spent so many paragraphs plugging a book that isn’t mine, and is selling like (oven-ready) hot cakes without my help. Disgusting.

Helen

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-354-634 {
padding-bottom: 55.83596214511041%;
padding-bottom: min(55.83596214511041%, 354px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-354-634 img {
max-width: 634px;
max-height: 354px;
}

PS. Weird request. I’m currently looking into a specific kind of internet deception: people who assume marginalised identities (eg pretending to be the descendant of Holocaust survivors, or the victim of a hate crime). Any examples gratefully received. One arresting story: the woman who became the head of the 9/11 survivors foundation . . . was not a 9/11 survivor. (Well, I guess she did survive 9/11, but only by being in Barcelona.)

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-819-1456 {
padding-bottom: 56.25%;
padding-bottom: min(56.25%, 819px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-819-1456 img {
max-width: 1456px;
max-height: 819px;
}

The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Interesting (Lithium)

Now, my own desperation to be interesting could stem from overarching feelings of inadequacy or maybe the fear of being unimportant in the great cosmic scheme of things or god forbid (even though we know this is the hard hitter) that sliver of satisfaction that comes with the deeply misogynistic phrase “you’re not like other girls.” I’ve come to realize that interesting implies an abundance of something as a quick remedy for a scarcity somewhere else. I’m ten times funnier than I’ll ever be pretty and I’m a hundred times more intelligent than I’ll ever be happy. I’m not sad, I’m well-rounded. 

I stole this from Caroline Crampton’s excellent newsletter, No Complaints.

Second Chances (NYRB)

I had unapologetically, almost unthinkingly, used a literary device in In the Freud Archives that was commonplace at The New Yorker but that outside journalists—in the accusatory atmosphere following the Lipman article—saw as another violation of the reader’s good faith. The device was the uninterrupted monologue in which characters made preposterously long speeches in impossibly good English. Anyone could see that the speech had never taken place as such but was a compilation of what the character had said to the reporter over a period of time. Not everyone liked the convention, but no one thought it was deceptive, since its artificiality was so blatant.

Argh I love Janet Malcolm’s writing so much but this is MENTAL. You can’t smush quotations together like this! Anyway, the timing of this piece suggests to me that it might be an allegory of everything the press got wrong in covering Donald Trump in 2016 - “I came across as arrogant, truculent, and incompetent” - and how they have a chance to redeem themselves now.

Data Theatre (Martin Robbins, Substack)

The government’s problem isn’t that it lacks information (although more reliable figures on a range of metrics would obviously help), it’s that it struggles to build a robust understanding of the situation from the information it has, that can form the basis for coherent, consistent policy. Each day brings some new finding - on COVID science, on public opinion, the level of anger among its back-benchers - that completely upends the previous model and sends them scrambling to change course, as if physicists had to frantically rewrite the entire laws of the universe upon the discovery of each new particle.

This sounds exactly right to me. The government is very self-satisfied about its continual polling and focus-grouping, but there’s a problem. People are really fickle, they often don’t know what they want, and they sometimes lie about it, too. They’re also terrible at telling you what they’ll think next week. Metrics can become a prison. They look objective but really aren’t. And you end up trying to give people more of what they want, without asking if that’s the right thing to do. Just ask journalism.

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-225-400 {
padding-bottom: 56.25%;
padding-bottom: min(56.25%, 225px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-225-400 img {
max-width: 400px;
max-height: 225px;
}

Quick Links

The Sopranos OH! megamix. Hat-tip to Tom Sutcliffe.

“In the shade of an expansive oak, six headstones mark the graves of Katharine and Andy White, Roger’s brother Joel White, his daughters Callie and Alice Angell, and his wife of forty-eight years, Carol Rogge Angell (1938-2012). Next to Carol’s is an identical seventh, a slender marble slab engraved with his own name and birth year, standing by.” (New Yorker)

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-300-600 {
padding-bottom: 50%;
padding-bottom: min(50%, 300px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-300-600 img {
max-width: 600px;
max-height: 300px;
}

I’m offering some journalism mentoring via Zoom. Register your interest here.

Happy Friday!

It’s all kicking off, isn’t it? Since we last spoke, I’ve been to see TENET (shrug), David Hare’s Covid monologue (did what it said on the tin) and recorded an episode of the News Quiz (tonight, 6.30pm, Radio 4). The first two involved Sitting Among Fellow Humans, and the latter used a “virtual audience” over Zoom. (I was sceptical, but it really worked.) In all three cases, lord, it was nice to hear crowd noises again.

Also, my boss has published a cracking story about Donald Trump. The Spark is back from 16 September. I’m already hugely enjoying Left Out, the definitive post-mortem of the Corbyn project.

In other words, it feels a bit like normal life is creeping back. Fingers crossed.

Helen

Robert Pattinson’s 90s Foreign Correspondent wardrobe is the best thing about Tenet

Women Scientists Have The Evidence on Sexism (Atlantic)

In their own research, scientists run randomized double-blind experiments, in which neither the scientist nor the subject knows who has received an experimental drug or a placebo, because they recognize their biases could cloud their interpretation of the data. Yet no such safeguards are in place for most of the decisions that affect the career of women scientists. Letters of recommendation for women are shorter and stress that the applicants “work hard” and are “diligent,” while letters about men use words such as outstanding and superstar.

This is as good a time as any to say that I’m writing another book, and it’s about genius. One of the many strands of it will be: who gets called “brilliant”? who gets encouraged to pursue their talents to the fullest? Another strand will be: yikes, there are a lot of books about genius which are clearly intended to secure their author a career on the corporate speaking circuit.

The Inside Story of The Wirecard Fraud (Financial Times)

At 12.30, Murphy slipped out of the FT HQ for a quick crab sandwich and glass of wine at Sweetings, an archaic lunch spot just across the river. But suddenly he was back and visibly alarmed. “We’ve got a leak! We’ve got a bloody leak!” he said to me. At Sweetings, he’d taken a call from a market trader, who said he’d heard there was a Wirecard article coming at 1pm and wondered what we were reporting. We sat and rolled through the names of those who knew we were planning to publish that day: the two of us, Nigel the lawyer, Lionel the editor. That was it. The copy wasn’t even in our content-management system yet. There was no leak from the FT. The penny dropped: any leak must have come from Wirecard.”

Wirecard looked like a solid, respectable company. But an FT investigation revealed irregularities in its books (and eventually, that more than a billion dollars of transactions were, simply, imaginary). The most remarkable part of this story is the dirty tricks campaign Wirecard waged against the newspaper, and particularly the lead reporter. It accused the FT of being in cahoots with short sellers: essentially, publishing negative stories solely to tank its share price. For a while, the German regulators seemed more interested in that than the fraud happening under their noses. It’s the details which make this story: the surveillance handbag; the security protections such as switching off your wifi router overnight; the sheer number of ‘reputation management’ firms which latched on to Wirecard (it was spending £120m a year on “advice” by the end).

Reading this, it will hit you: The bad guys have lots of money. Journalists who want to expose them need deep pockets, too.

In Our Family’s Darkest Moment, A Stranger Helped (Atlantic)

I miss strangers. I long for connections with people I do not know. We are so separate now. We have so few opportunities for brief interactions: a random shared joke with someone in an elevator. A quip that turns into a conversation with a store clerk. Even the banter with a chatty restaurant server. I’ve always known that I get a lot of satisfaction from talking with people I don’t know about things that matter to them—that’s why I interview people for a living. But the pandemic has made me realize how much I need even the most casual interactions with strangers. I need those people to feel less strange. I need to feel like we aren’t all floating around in our own bubbles, concerned only with the health, pocketbooks, and survival of ourselves and the ones we love. Because if we stop being able to connect with those we don’t know, if we stop being able to see ourselves in them, our empathy starts to atrophy. And then where are we as people? As a society? What are we left with?

Until reading this, I hadn’t quite surfaced this thought. I’ve stayed in touch with my close friends and family, but what I’ve really missed in the last six months is all those little moments of serendipity.

Quick Links

Can’t beat Jesse’s proposed headline for this piece. (Medium)

“A strange phenomenon has emerged near Amazon.com Inc. delivery stations and Whole Foods stores in the Chicago suburbs: smartphones dangling from trees.” (Bloomberg)

“The point is this: you don’t need to do anything wrong to get death threats, rape threats, etc. You just need a big enough audience.” Never become famous, and particularly, never become internet-famous. (Tim Ferris’s blog)

Regular readers will know that I sometimes read sentences about Sophie Lewis and get confused that they’re not about me. (“Lewis’s vision of feminism is inherently communist…”) That confusion is not likely to arise between her partner and my partner, because hers believes in looting: “you get to the heart of that property relation, and demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free”. (NPR)

“What do you want me to say? What they want you to say is, ‘I enjoyed being a part of it. It was a great experience...’ Nah, nah, nah. I’ll take that deal when it’s a great experience. They gave all the nuance to Adam Driver, all the nuance to Daisy Ridley. Let’s be honest. Daisy knows this. Adam knows this. Everybody knows. I’m not exposing anything.” John Boyega in GQ.

Advertisers are told that it’s bad to put their ads alongside “negative” news coverage. But who decides what’s negative? (A hit-and-miss algorithm.) And where does the spend go instead? (To dodgy sites.)

GENERIC THRILLER by BIG TIME WRITER. Love this analysis of the cliches of book jacket design.

Had never heard of these “friend of the police” cards. Should be outlawed, IMO.

See you next week!

Happy Friday!

This week, I have woken up every day, checked the news overnight from America, and thought: oh crap. Zoom out a little bit: Trump has presided over an objectively bad pandemic response. The US economy is shaken: high unemployment, sketchy plans to get back to normal, millions without health insurance or adequate child care. Several members of Trump’s team are now either in prison, out of prison, or potentially going to prison. A serving member of the military sacrificed his career to allege that Trump had committed an impeachable offence, and it just . . . slid off. More than a dozen women have made credible allegations of sexual assault against him. The White House staff turnover looks like a plague hospital after someone coughed on the break-room biscuits. Dozens of officials from previous Republican campaigns and administrations have warned that he is a threat: Colin Powell spoke at the Democrat convention. After the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold revealed how much the Trump Organisation is profiting from taxpayer cash (charging the Secret Service room fees while Trump golfs at his own resorts, for example), the OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE RESPONSE was to say it was compiling a “dossier” on Fahrenthold for “interfering” in a private business.

People talk a lot about the smugness and complacency of the liberals who didn’t see Trump coming in 2016. Now, that smugness and complacency is the entire property of people who don’t want to acknowledge that Trump’s instincts are naturally authoritarian, and they have no obvious limit. Things aren’t going to snap back to “normal” whatever happens in November. Given a second term, there is no reason to suspect he won’t be worse.

And then you realise - well, that’s my reality. Over to Kevin Roose at the NYT: “Inside the right-wing Facebook bubble, President Trump’s response to Covid-19 has been strong and effective, Joe Biden is barely capable of forming sentences, and Black Lives Matter is a dangerous group of violent looters.” The conservative commentator Ben Shapiro has had 56 million interactions on his Facebook page in the last 30 days, more than the “main pages of ABC News, NBC News, The New York Times, The Washington Post and NPR combined”.

In the Sunday Times last week, I wrote about the QAnon conspiracy theory, of which two things are equally true: it sounds bonkers to outsiders, and it has hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of believers.

Actually, one other thing is true: QAnon wouldn’t exist in the form it does without social media platforms. The targeting algorithms of YouTube, Facebook and the rest have identified all the people with a susceptibility to its core message (that you can’t trust the media, that the “Deep State” is running the world) by fishing in the pools of smaller fringe beliefs. You watch a video on reiki, or poltergeists, or some weird diet, and five videos later, someone is telling you that elites are harvesting children’s blood.

Social media algorithms identify the woo-curious. Not all of the QAnon supporters once believed that, say, crop circles were made by aliens. But they probably thought the lack of explanation for them was intriguing. There is a sizeable part of the population which is deeply sceptical of information gatekeepers, and thinks “there’s no smoke without fire.” Isn’t it a bit strange the flag on the Moon landing pictures looks like it’s fluttering in a breeze? Could Kennedy really have been shot by a lone gunman? People say horoscopes are bunk, but I sure sound like a Virgo! Take the woo-curious, and feed them a constant media diet of 5G conspiracies, Soros memes and anti-vaxx propaganda, and suddenly: Toto, they’re not theorising about ley lines any more.

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-500-516 {
padding-bottom: 96.89922480620154%;
padding-bottom: min(96.89922480620154%, 500px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-500-516 img {
max-width: 516px;
max-height: 500px;
}

The worst thing is that no one, even the people who think deeply about this subject, has any real idea how you undo it. Here’s a great thread about “epistemic closure” - the people I described above aren’t just in an echo chamber, not hearing contrary facts. They are locked in a belief system where any contrary facts can be easily explained away. (As Julian Sanchez puts it, if someone tells you the Illuminati don’t control the world, you can just assume they’re working for the Illuminati.)

All the realistic ways to tackle the infodemic would involve stuff like Facebook changing its algorithm to reduce virality, or the company committing to enforcing its own platform rules against misinformation, aggressively and consistently. The former would be asking Facebook to make its product less compelling to users, and less good at making money. The latter would be a) expensive; b) asymmetric, because the right has been far more successful at cultivating this ecosystem of bullshit. I’m not sure I see the mechanism for convincing Facebook to do any of these things, outside of US government intervention (unlikely) or a massive consumer revolt (ditto).

To stop myself from wallowing in despair, I have mostly been watching Harlots, the Hulu series now available on the BBC. From the start, I wondered how it would manage the tone: would it go full Belle de Jour and imply that selling sex is a whirl of glamorous dress-up and drinking cocktails with men who are inexplicably visiting a hooker despite clearly being very attractive and socially adept?

Ah, no. Even though you can feel it occasionally straining to make a feminist point not justified by the material (Look at this female-dominated world . . . of women dependent on male whims!), it doesn’t shy away from the violence and precarity of the world it depicts. It’s a thin line to walk, and occasionally uncomfortable to watch: the swings from sexy-sex (ooh! ah! Monsieur!) to argh-sex leave you feeling a bit complicit. One minute you’re appreciating the fondant fancy dresses (the 18th century had the best colour scheme of any century) and the next you’re watching someone powerless, caught in real danger. This is a job where rape is an occupational hazard, and is therefore treated fairly casually by the characters.

More happily, Jessica Brown Findlay spends at least half of the first half-dozen episodes eating fruit suggestively and having rows with the posh one from Fleabag and Mamma Mia 2. My other warning would be that you need to have a medium-high tolerance for Period Drama Language. In the last episode I watched, a drunk woman shouted: “I am the Duchess of Quim!” to the street at large. I wonder what the subsidiary titles to that are. Do write in.

Helen

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-279-500 {
padding-bottom: 55.800000000000004%;
padding-bottom: min(55.800000000000004%, 279px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-279-500 img {
max-width: 500px;
max-height: 279px;
}

Alan Davies: I’ve Become A Huge Enemy of Silence and Secrecy (Guardian)

When I auditioned to be Jonathan Creek, I was one of 38 white men. When I made the pilot for QI, I was one of five white men on the panel. I was one of five white men on lots of panels, for years. Nowadays, there is a movement to redress the balance, and publishers are looking for more women and people of colour, and in the middle of all that, here are white middle-aged men writing about their actual life, emotions and feelings. They’ve stopped trying to concoct a version of themselves to present to the world. They’ve started to tell the truth.

Like Robert Webb, Alan Davies always carried a faint undertow of sadness, even at his funniest - think of his adorable bloodhound face above a duffel coat in Jonathan Creek. And both of them have taken the honesty that allowed them to plunder their lives and psyches for comedy, and used it in later life to write about their fathers. More of this please. (There’s an extract of the book here.)

Bonus Dad Content: Like many other people, I saw the pictures of Charlie Gilmour dangling off the Cenotaph a few years ago and thought: privileged idiot. Then he pitched me something at the New Statesman (about prisons, I think) and I was bowled over by his prose and his lack of self-pity. His new book is about his runaway father and becoming a father himself. On the strength of this extract, I’m into it.

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-200-355 {
padding-bottom: 56.33802816901409%;
padding-bottom: min(56.33802816901409%, 200px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-200-355 img {
max-width: 355px;
max-height: 200px;
}

Blockchain: The Amazing Solution to Almost Nothing (The Correspondent)

The only thing is that there’s a huge gap between promise and reality. It seems that blockchain sounds best in a PowerPoint slide. Most blockchain projects don’t make it past a press release, an inventory by Bloomberg showed. The Honduran land registry was going to use blockchain. That plan has been shelved.  The Nasdaq was also going to do something with blockchain. Not happening.  The Dutch Central Bank then? Nope.  Out of over 86,000 blockchain projects that had been launched, 92% had been abandoned by the end of 2017, according to consultancy firm Deloitte. 

Why are they deciding to stop? Enlightened – and thus former – blockchain developer Mark van Cuijk explained: “You could also use a forklift to put a six-pack of beer on your kitchen counter. But it’s just not very efficient.” 

Hat-tip to Jonathan, who suggested this. The amount of energy used for mining bitcoin and verifying transactions is nuts.

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-282-500 {
padding-bottom: 56.39999999999999%;
padding-bottom: min(56.39999999999999%, 282px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-282-500 img {
max-width: 500px;
max-height: 282px;
}
Is this . . . a fake pineapple? If so, why?

Given my time again, I wouldn’t choose journalism (Unherd)

Being mad was important because the economics of this kind of content required fast output (since timeliness is critical) and high engagement (since this is how editors, and writers, measure success). I write quickly when I’m angry, and anger begets more anger, so people are more likely to share and react. Not everything I wrote when this was my main form of journalism was bad, but only some of it was good, and the worst of it had a dishonesty that made me feel ashamed: I was deliberately riling myself so I could rile other people in turn, and the arguments I offered had a kind of incuriosity, a clamshell quality, where the main thing to recommend them was how impervious I could make them to critique.

Sobering piece by Sarah Ditum about the hollowing out of journalism: the structural disease below so many of the symptoms we see in public discussion.

My current answer to the problem of an attention economy (and rage economy) is to try to ignore the noise and plough my own furrow. But then, I’m in a very lucky position. Across the industry, journalists are being laid off by the hundred. Sarah is right: people might hate journalists, but you’ll miss us when we’re gone.

Quick Links

The extracts of Patrick Maguire’s new book on the Corbyn Project, co-authored with Gabriel Pogrund, have been great. Can’t wait to read the whole thing. Disclosure: I knew Patrick when he was a young whippersnapper at the NS. (Now, he’s like . . . 23 or something.)

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s guest-edit of Vanity Fair: “The Great Fire”.

“I had approved a redesign of the bathroom in all white, which meant the green onyx tub obviously no longer fit. . . impulsively (and partly out of sheer frustration), I said to the team with their clipboards and rulers, ‘Okay, take it out. That's it. I'm done. I'm letting it go.’ They cheered. I fled, trying not to cry.” I was profoundly moved by Oprah’s life lesson here.

“‘Karen does really well for us,’ Kris Seavers, an editor for The Daily Dot, told me. ‘We’re always looking for the latest Karen.’” Who’s making money from all those viral videos of bad behaviour - and driving more people to record them? (Atlantic)

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-300-540 {
padding-bottom: 55.55555555555556%;
padding-bottom: min(55.55555555555556%, 300px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-300-540 img {
max-width: 540px;
max-height: 300px;
}
She must have exemplary Vitamin C levels[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-300-600 {
padding-bottom: 50%;
padding-bottom: min(50%, 300px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-300-600 img {
max-width: 600px;
max-height: 300px;
}

You know I will never stop with this, right?

Happy Friday!

I’m writing this from a soulless short-let apartment in the middle of the City, and oh my god, it’s amazing. After five months of barely leaving Lewisham, I had almost forgotten I lived in London, or indeed why anyone would live in London. But I have a week off the Atlantic, and so I’ve come to an eyrie to write/read/eat takeaway.

My dirty secret is that I love travelling for work, staying in weird B&Bs with strange people wandering the halls, eating whatever Norwich’s finest three-star hotel considers to be a passable simulacrum of a plate of nachos. Once, before Lib Dem conference, I forked over £30 in cash to be upgraded to a suite with a jacuzzi, in which I sat, watching Strictly Come Dancing. This is my idea of heaven. Nothing brightens my heart quite like finishing an interview in a strange town and repairing to a Wetherspoons for I’m-going-to-say-chicken smothered in cheese and barbecue sauce, unfeasibly large peas, and a big mug of tea. There are no calories on the road.

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-563-422 {
padding-bottom: 133.31043956043956%;
padding-bottom: min(133.31043956043956%, 562.570054945055px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-563-422 img {
max-width: 422px;
max-height: 562.570054945055px;
}
Portrait of the Artist As Someone Who Is Not In F***ing Lewisham

Getting out of the house also reminded me how much I love the Thames. When I first moved to London, I worked nights as an uploader at “Guardian Unlimited” while studying in the daytime. The big perk was a free cab home at 1am or 3am or whenever, taking me across one of the bridges as the skyscraper lights glittered on the water. Until the pandemic put a stop to all joy, the only good bit of my commute was seeing the Thames every day, blue at night, brown by day, this dirty great artery pulsing through the city.

I’ve been re-reading some Terry Pratchett recently, and it’s funny that someone who was clearly a countryphile nonetheless created the Ankh - a river so grossly clogged you could bounce rocks off it - and obviously had huge affection for it. (In Moving Pictures, Gaspode the Wonder Dog remembers how his owner tried to drown him in a sack in the Ankh as a puppy, but he just walked to shore.) I feel like that about the Thames. From its banks, I could see mudlarkers, joggers, selfie-takers, coffee-drinkers, Uber boats (?!), rusted hulks, HMS Belfast and the improbable Victorian cake fantasy that is Tower Bridge. It felt alive, and so did I.

This week I read two snack-sized books. Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy is a good primer if you’ve been wondering what the hell is going on in Poland and Hungary (spoiler: it’s not good) and why all the dodgy authoritarians seem to hang out together. Zadie Smith’s Intimations is so slight that it would feel a bit of a swizz if the proceeds weren’t going to charity; nonetheless, it’s cathartic to read someone so cool and reflective writing about the mad year we’ve had. She was also great on the Adam Buxton podcast, although judging by how many texts I got when I was on the Adam Buxton podcast, you all listen to that anyway.

Helen

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-819-1456 {
padding-bottom: 56.25%;
padding-bottom: min(56.25%, 819px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-819-1456 img {
max-width: 1456px;
max-height: 819px;
}

The Karen War Will Never End (Atlantic)

In her 1991 essay “From Practice to Theory, or What is a White Woman Anyway?” the feminist and legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon referenced the Till case to explain the malignant stereotype that has grown up around the “white woman” in the United States. “This creature is not poor, not battered, not raped (not really), not molested as a child, not pregnant as a teenager, not prostituted, not coerced into pornography, not a welfare mother, and not economically exploited,” wrote MacKinnon. “She is Miss Anne of the kitchen, she puts Frederick Douglass to the lash, she cries rape when Emmett Till looks at her sideways, she manipulates white men’s very real power with the lifting of her very well-manicured little finger.” She might have added, echoing the LA Times: Nothing worse happens to the white woman than a viral-video shaming.

I finally wrote about Karens, with far less bravery than several women before me, who got dog’s abuse for pointing out that its usage was obviously now drifting into sexism, whatever its origins. Honestly, watch that Paul Joseph Watson video I link to and tell me it’s not purest essence of “shut UP mum you can’t make me tidy my rooooooom”.

The Murder of Seth Rich (Rolling Stone)

This is the true story of an untrue story. It’s the story of how Fox News took a conspiracy theory from the online fringes and mainstreamed it into global news. It’s the story of how a Fox News staff writer, a Fox News paid contributor, and a Fox News unpaid commentator worked together to win the trust of a family wracked by grief and then used their imprimatur to publish a “sham story” that would become an article of faith in MAGA culture. It’s the story of how Fox News and some of its biggest stars have so far escaped any accountability for actions whose consequences continue to haunt the Rich family.

This is so, so awful. Needing an alternative narrative to “Wikileaks, with the help of a Russian hacker, obtained the DNC emails”, the MAGA-sphere hit on the idea that the emails had been stolen by someone inside the party, who was then killed to cover up the crime. The insider’s name was Seth Rich.

What his family have been through since his murder is appalling. This is perhaps the most upsetting sentence in the piece: “On May 23rd, a week after it was first published and went viral, Fox retracted Zimmerman’s story.” A whole week of an incredibly powerful news network aiming all its artillery at a grieving family, abetted by an army of internet sleuths . . . all for a story that fell apart on contact with any scepticism.

PS One sub-plot of this story is that the Trump administration really has been Springtime for Grifters. I guess when you look around and see, eg Roger Stone getting welcomed on to the team, and then pardoned, yer average shady character thinks: why not me?

Mmm, the Carefree World of Porn, Why Do You Prudes Criticise It, Part 12543 (Vice)

They also found a video script entitled “22 Whores + 5 Shady Lawyers VS GirlsDoPorn,” with the subheading, “Share and spread this video as far and wide as possible” and listed the names of the plaintiffs in the civil suit, "along with information intended to embarrass, harass and intimidate them," according to the FBI, including full names and location.

“Ask yourself how viral these videos will go now if nobody is controlling them . . . . Good Job :)” the script said.

Brian Holm, one of the lead attorneys representing the women in the Girls Do Porn case, told me that the fact that the Girls Do Porn owners were preparing to release a video to dox them is not surprising at all. Since filing the case three years ago, Holm and his co-counsel John O’Brien have endured endless, aggressive harassment.

In November, Pratt and Girls Do Porn producer Kevin Gibson allegedly harassed Holm by photoshopping his face into porn to make it look like he was posing with two male porn actors. The images were spread through social media.

If only their website full of images of people being degraded through sexual imagery had given us some clue that they thought it was acceptable to degrade people through sexual imagery!

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-281-500 {
padding-bottom: 56.2%;
padding-bottom: min(56.2%, 281px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-281-500 img {
max-width: 500px;
max-height: 281px;
}

Quick Links

Radiohead play “Nobody Does It Better” in 1995, three years before they sadly all died and didn’t make any more albums.

Anyone who ever watched America’s Next Top Model will recognise that what Gavin Williamson is doing here is “smizing”.

My favourite US election ad so far. It’s a real covfefe-spitter.

How Two British Orthodontists Became Celebrities to Incels (NYT). Instant winner of Headline of the Week.

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-300-600 {
padding-bottom: 50%;
padding-bottom: min(50%, 300px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-300-600 img {
max-width: 600px;
max-height: 300px;
}

See you next time!

Happy 150th Bluestocking!

This week, I went on the Deliciously Ella podcast to talk about how women’s behaviour is scrutinised, not least because newspapers love to illustrate trend stories with fit twentysomethings.

And sorry: I had planned more hoopla for the 150th edition of The Bluestocking; unfortunately, all my energies this week were concentrated into not boiling to death. Instead, the only treat I can offer is this arguably NSFW remix of Ben Shapiro reading the lyrics to “WAP”.

Helen

The Fight For Fertility Equality (NYT)

While plenty of New Yorkers have formed families by gestational surrogacy, they almost certainly worked with carriers living elsewhere. Because until early April, paying a surrogate to carry a pregnancy was illegal in New York state.

The change to the law, which happened quietly in the midst of the state’s effort to contain the coronavirus, capped a decade-long legislative battle and has laid the groundwork for a broader movement in pursuit of what some activists have termed “fertility equality.”

Still in its infancy, this movement envisions a future when the ability to create a family is no longer determined by one’s wealth, sexuality, gender or biology.

“This is about society extending equality to its final and logical conclusion,” said Ron Poole-Dayan, the founder and executive director of Men Having Babies, a New York nonprofit that helps gay men become fathers through surrogacy. “True equality doesn’t stop at marriage. It recognizes the barriers L.G.B.T.s face in forming families and proposes solutions to overcome these obstacles.”

It’s a Yikes from me. This piece is a glowing account of “breaking down barriers” to “everyone” being able to have the family they want. Except “everyone” here means rich people, and breaking down barriers means commercialising the life-threatening process of pregnancy and childbirth. This story treats as a side-issue the “carriers” (women) on whom this equality will depend, and doesn’t really delve into the fact that once you allow economic incentives into surrogacy, what you get is rich people paying poor women for the use of their bodies.

That’s a hard and (to some) grotesque thing to face, and so what happens? If stories like this are anything to go by, the progressive answer is: Barely mention the “carriers”, because they might complicate this upbeat story of LGBT liberation. It’s great that more gay people are having families - I write in Difficult Women about Jackie Forster, who ran a guerrilla fertility programme setting up gay men from the Campaign for Homosexual Equality with lesbians who weren’t allowed to adopt because of discriminatory policies at local councils - but there is no human right to have someone else bear you a child, and rightly so. It’s a situation ripe for exploitation.

Incidentally, Britain is currently considering relaxing its ban on commercial surrogacy, with a commission reporting in 2022.

Check Yourself Before You Rec Yourself

I was recently asked on Twitter for newsletter recommendations, so here they are.

The Ruffian. Ian Leslie’s weekly digest leans heavily into music, psychology and the science of communication.

Singal Minded. Jesse Singal, spelunker of the dankest internet beef. If you secretly enjoy the madder fringes of Twitter, but worry that when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you, this is what you need instead.

The Weekly Dish by Andrew Sullivan, and Matt Taibbi, cover American culture wars/politics from the awkward right and the awkward left, respectively.

The OK, Karen. Glosswitch, also known as Victoria Smith, has always been one of the most interesting radical feminist writers around. Her latest newsletter, on how we deal with anorexia, and the concept of the “symptom pool”, is thoughtful and challenging.

Invisible Women. Caroline explained nine newsletters ago what she means by starting each newsletter with “Hey GFPs” but I’ve forgotten and am now too scared to ask. Features loo queue of the week.

I also subscribe to the Politico morning email (comprehensive), Stephen Bush’s Morning Call, Paul Waugh’s evening newsletter the Waugh Zone, and Axios’s weekly media briefing. Plus Caroline Crampton’s sporadic No Complaints, Sarah Ditum’s The Stacks, and Gia Milinovich’s My Apophenic Haze.

Man, I subscribe to a lot of newsletters.

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-288-320 {
padding-bottom: 90%;
padding-bottom: min(90%, 288px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-288-320 img {
max-width: 320px;
max-height: 288px;
}

Quick Links

I thought I’d seen everything, but the resignation of the editor of Poetry magazine for publishing this poem is a new frontier. To be honest, the poem’s real crime is that it takes up 30 pages of the magazine despite only being about 100 lines long. (More background here.)

“The most militant internal opponents of Corbyn’s leadership, who defected in February 2019 to form something called ‘Change UK’, then the ‘Independent Group for Change’, are now finding new careers in lobbying and consultancy after losing their seats in last year’s election. Chuka Umunna and Luciana Berger have joined the communications firm Edelman UK, while Chris Leslie has become chief executive of a trade association for debt collectors. The party they believed to be dangerous and no longer able to accommodate them is now rebranding itself as a kind of democratically elected management consultancy.” (LRB)

An update on the Peterson family.

Reader feedback, from E, commenting on my concerns that writers who aren’t white men get the “identity treatment”. “It was one of the things that annoyed me about the coverage of Queenie — yes, it's a great insight into the black female millennial experience, a subject that was long overdue to be represented in literature, but it's also a clear update of Pride & Prejudice via Bridget Jones’ Diary, with a strong influence from Adrian Mole.” OK, this sounds like a book I’d be into.

“So detrimental was the cycle of overproduction and discounting to luxury goods that in 2018, Burberry, the British label, revealed that it had been burning — not metaphorically but literally: burning — $37 million of worth of merchandise per year to maintain ‘brand value.’” Sweatpants Forever, Or How The Fashion Industry Nuked Itself (New York Times)

“As he works his way to the end, [Kurt] Andersen actually does the thing I once told my editor I would do and then just didn’t: propose solutions on the heels of his criticisms.” An enjoyable review of an important-sounding book on American politics. (NYT)

Leon Wieseltier got cancelled for an absolute barrage of allegations that he was inappropriate and weird to female colleagues. Three years later, he’s edited a 420-page magazine about liberalism. There is one aspect of this story which will make you go, hmmmmmmmmm, I guarantee it. (Airmail)

Oh, Frank Luntz has a $1m replica of the Oval Office in his home in Brentwood, that’s so kooky! Oh wait . . . he also has a replica of WHAT now?

“We could simply improve outcomes for everyone just by treating police officers like politicians do teachers: hardworking and well-meaning people who are doing the best they can, but who have plenty of their own prejudices and hang-ups, too.” Stevie B on how to deal with the police. (Standard)

“‘As much as Corbyn didn’t win, he’s very popular among some sections of black voters and leftwing voters,’ said Maurice McLeod, a Labour councillor from south-west London, citing Corbyn’s antiracism work and policies concentrated on deprived communities. ‘He’s kind of like what some people used to say about [Bill] Clinton: he’s as close as you can come to a black candidate.’” (Guardian)

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-539-416 {
padding-bottom: 129.55555555555554%;
padding-bottom: min(129.55555555555554%, 538.9511111111111px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-539-416 img {
max-width: 416px;
max-height: 538.9511111111111px;
}

Tactics For Dealing With Twitter

Thanks for all the replies to my callout in the last newsletter. There were so many! It’s amazing that a company has built a business model on a product that a significant percentage of its users actively resent.

“If I get an especially horrible and uncalled for tweet, I sometimes search for the name of the tweeter and a word like ‘job’ ‘life’ or ‘girlfriend’ in their posts,” says one Bluestocking reader. “A reminder that there are a lot of unfulfilled and angry people on social media.”

Here’s Niamh on why she’s still on Twitter: “I think the real reason is basically the same as why I used to go to horrible cliquey parties as a teenager. Because if I didn’t go, I wouldn’t know. Know what?? Who was cool, who wasn't. Who was safe, who wasn't. What to say, and what not to. I'm not proud of this.”

“My solution has been to block Twitter completely on my phone and block my timeline on my laptop,” says James. “That means I can post tweets, see notifications and look at other people’s pages without getting sucked into the pit of despair that comes from scrolling through random fruitless arguments.”

“The eureka moment was replacing the ‘ooh, let’s have a look on Twitter’ with other, less (apparently) harmful outlets that operate in a similar fashion, and inject the same rush. For me, Discord and Substack were the game-changers,” says Chris.

The winner, however, is Debra. “I did something that has turned out to be unexpectedly incredibly useful. I started three twitter accounts relating to my different interests (politics / general, football and books). I did this because I thought it would confuse people if I tweeted about such varied things from one account, but actually it’s had a massive side benefit. If the whole politics / general account is just shrieking people who are angry about The Thing We All Have To Be Angry About Right Now, I swap to the books account and immerse myself in what the latest releases are. If Arsenal are playing I can swap to my football account and watch along with other fans, or if they’re playing dreadfully I can swap to one of the others and avoid all mention.” Bet your other two accounts get a lot of use then, eh, Debra? BANTER! HIGH FIVE! BACK OF THE NET!

There you have it. Maybe the answer to Twitter is . . . more Twitter?

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-300-970 {
padding-bottom: 30.927835051546392%;
padding-bottom: min(30.927835051546392%, 300px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-300-970 img {
max-width: 970px;
max-height: 300px;
}

See you next time, and thank you for all the emails. Keep ‘em coming.

Happy . . . Thursday!

I’m out and about tomorrow, so your regular Friday Bluestocking is arriving a day early. Here is my pick of the week’s best reads, plus (as ever) some shameless self-promotion.

It’s my 150th edition next time, so I want to address an issue which shouldn’t preoccupy me, but does. When Twitter is so awful, why can’t I quit it cold turkey? If you have thoughts, hit “reply”.

Helen

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-300-970 {
padding-bottom: 30.927835051546392%;
padding-bottom: min(30.927835051546392%, 300px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-300-970 img {
max-width: 970px;
max-height: 300px;
}

What About The Domestic Violence Victims Who Won’t Leave (Atlantic, by me)

These efforts are based around the same assumption: that victims leave. But only 30 percent of domestic-violence survivors who seek help use a refuge, according to the Labour lawmaker Jess Phillips, drawing on figures from the charity SafeLives. “Most women don’t think their partners are beyond redemption,” she told me. But those who stay—the majority—get very little support, as do their partners. Britain’s biggest charity working with perpetrators, Respect, has an annual income of £1.5 million, a tenth of the income of the biggest women’s charity in the sector, Refuge. In most cases of domestic violence, the state offers victims a menu with only one option. If they don’t take it, they’re on their own.

This week, I revisited a question that has fascinated me since writing the Erin Pizzey chapter of Difficult Women: can violent men be changed? One of my interviewees, Emily Alison, is doing exciting work on perpetrator programmes, and on helping women keep custody of their children (which they might lose if they expose the kids to a dangerous environment, ie their partners).

Domestic violence is a murkier topic than we might like to admit: it would be easier if every abused woman (and man) upped and left at the first sign of coercive control or the first slap or punch. They don’t. So what then?

The Donald Trump Interview

a.image2.image-link.image2-240-320 {
padding-bottom: 75%;
padding-bottom: min(75%, 240px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-240-320 img {
max-width: 320px;
max-height: 240px;
}

See you next time!

Happy Friday!

This week I had a ramble chat with Adam Buxton (recorded in May) about . . . well, cargo cults, negativity bias, Jordan Peterson, Munchausen’s by internet and why I want to have some toilets named after me. We also talked about Difficult Women, and why he shouldn’t encourage his daughter to idolise Coco Chanel, even though it might help her survive a world war. Listen here.

Helen

PS. Sophie Wilkinson, who I interviewed in the Love chapter, has a newsletter. She writes a little about DW in the latest one.

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-361-542 {
padding-bottom: 66.6%;
padding-bottom: min(66.6%, 360.972px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-361-542 img {
max-width: 542px;
max-height: 360.972px;
}

Where Are The Young Male Novelists? (The Times)

“One publisher I speak to tells me that modern publishing is shaped by a preoccupation with identity politics. It’s “really, really hard” to publish literary fiction by young white men because “the culture doesn’t really want to hear from them”. That preoccupation pervades wider literary culture too: landing newspaper interviews with young white male novelists can be almost as impossible as finding them places on prize lists. There hasn’t been a young (if you count young as under 40) white British man on the Booker shortlist since 2011.”

What’s to blame for this, I think, is the well-meaning but fundamentally lazy mode of journalism which assumes that the most interesting things to say about a writer relate to their identity, or how that identity affects their work. See, for example, this description of one of the books on the Booker longlist, from the Guardian: “Other debuts include Real Life by US author Brandon Taylor, following a black, queer, introverted man from Alabama, which was described by judges as ‘a deeply painful, nuanced account of microaggressions, abuse, racism, homophobia, trauma, grief and alienation’.”

Right, but what’s the plot? What’s the literary tradition? How does it enlarge or subvert the form of the novel? What’s notable about its prose style, or its structure?

There’s a great strand of activism on Twitter which can be boiled down to “normalise asking black artists and writers about their craft, not their identity”. (Otherwise it’s “Steven Spielberg on the shots which make him a master storyteller” while we get “Ava DuVernay on being chronicler of black American life”.) Every female comedian in the world is bored with being asked “what’s it like to be a female comedian?” And yes, the fact that James Baldwin was both black and gay is central to his work, but it diminishes him not to talk, too, about what an incredible prose stylist he was, and what an acute observer of humanity and politics.

And then the flip side of all that is that publishers can’t get publicity for young white men . . . because they can’t speak “as a”.

PS. The other real insight in this piece is that maybe men have abandoned literary fiction because there’s no money in it (or even vice versa?) Maleness and prestige/seriousness are often interlinked. In the 1970s, literary fiction turned you into a Public Intellectual. Now, non-fiction is now the ticket to money and TED talks.

PPS. I discovered last night that the backlash to this was so intense that James has left Twitter, although hopefully only briefly.

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-747-1456 {
padding-bottom: 51.30494505494505%;
padding-bottom: min(51.30494505494505%, 747px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-747-1456 img {
max-width: 1456px;
max-height: 747px;
}

I Visited Disney World During A Pandemic (Atlantic)

The guests have willingly submitted to the authority of the microstate of Disney World, and their submission is total, because they have judged Disney to be a trustworthy custodian of that authority.

Consider the anarchy of Florida, the state that surrounds it. Roughly one in 10 citizens has filed paperwork to carry a gun concealed on his person. The state song until recently still used the word darkies. The people are so ornery that they cannot be persuaded to wrap bandannas around their faces to save their own lives. Mosquitoes are large enough to engage in dogfights with hummingbirds. The state lizard is Roger Stone.

And then there is Disney World—a little bit of Singapore in the midst of America’s Yemen. Walt Disney is its Lee Kuan Yew. It is nothing if not competently administered. It has a public-transportation system far exceeding the capacity of the systems of the hometowns of many of the visitors. Those who enforce the law are trusted and proportionate: If you refuse to wear a mask, a cast member will find you and correct you, gently. The list of incidents at the park reads like the police blotter of a sedate New England town, not of a fantasyland surrounded by quarrelsome, armed eccentrics.

I know it wasn’t the intention, but this piece kinda made me want to go to Disneyland. It sounds so eerie! Plus: no queues.

Also, I love the observation that Disneyland is basically Singapore (clean, polite but heavily surveilled) and all these supposedly libertarian Americans are totally chill with it. I’ve long wondered if anti-government sentiment in America is so high because their government is so useless. Mind you, that might be because America just fundamentally doesn’t make sense as a country sized unit.

Bonus: Graeme’s deadpan facial expression in the photo above, which clearly telegraphs oh man I wish I were back covering Isis.

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-432-576 {
padding-bottom: 75%;
padding-bottom: min(75%, 432px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-432-576 img {
max-width: 576px;
max-height: 432px;
}

Andy Ngo Has The Newest New Media Career. It's Made Him A Victim And A Star (BuzzFeed)

What is the national story that has given a whole generation of journalists, myself included, across every stratum of media, a platform? The never-ending American culture war, online and offline, that sometimes breaks out into violence. There’s not a lot of news in what Ngo does. It’s not man bites dog that antifa is violent or that some hate crimes are made up or that college students say dumb things. But there is a demand, a big one, to showcase leftists and minorities as villains. How many freelance videographers nursing well whiskeys in the dive bars of Brooklyn would trade a few punches from a Proud Boy for a job at Vice? The media is shrinking, and to squeeze oneself in needs a leg up: a connection, an uncommon aptitude, or the willingness to do things other people simply aren’t.

“Grifter” puts the blame for Andy Ngo completely on Andy Ngo. There is a corporate media system — Twitter, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal — that wants Andy Ngo, that needs Andy Ngo, and it prefers him with a black eye because it’s better content.

This is a great story about Andy Ngo, whose schtick is to go to protests, film the ubiquitous minority of people who go to protests for a ruck, and sell that to rightwing sites who want to bolster an “antifa are coming to get you” narrative.

In the process, Ngo has put himself in danger - he’s recognisable from his videos, and he was beaten up recently in Portland. The writer of this piece, Joseph Bernstein, identifies a phenomenon that’s much wider than Ngo: self-harm in the service of ambition. (Think of all those eye-watering first person essays on sleeping with your father etc, which are the female equivalent.)

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-606-1456 {
padding-bottom: 41.620879120879124%;
padding-bottom: min(41.620879120879124%, 606px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-606-1456 img {
max-width: 1456px;
max-height: 606px;
}

A rococo basilisk, yesterday

Quick Links

‘“My assessment about why A.I. is overlooked by very smart people is that very smart people do not think a computer can ever be as smart as they are,” [Elon Musk] told me. “And this is hubris and obviously false.”’ (New York Times) Bonus: discover the Google search, and terrible pun, which brought him and Grimes together.

“This process of systematically measuring teeth and pointing out the way they diverge from the ideal is essential to create demand.” (Atlantic)

“I ended things a little while later, which prompted a barrage of texts from him with a lot of derogatory language. It confirmed what I’d begun to suspect: as much as he’d reeled me in with an outwardly “woke” persona, in reality, we were never going to see eye to eye. I had been wokefished.” (Vice)

I learned a new phrase this week which is pure Brass Eye: cuckoo smurfing.

The biggest beneficiary of President Trump’s grotesque personal awfulness is George Bush. (Meanwhile, Barack Obama: a man who can get a standing ovation at a funeral.)

Guest gif: go into the weekend like Adam, Joe and Louis.

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-250-435 {
padding-bottom: 57.47126436781609%;
padding-bottom: min(57.47126436781609%, 250px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-250-435 img {
max-width: 435px;
max-height: 250px;
}

If you enjoy this newsletter, feel free to forward it to friends, hit “reply” and tell me a joke, or buy my book.

Happy Friday!

This week, I spoke to the Depolarization Project about a subject where I changed my mind: prostitution. A nice quick newsletter today as I’ve been knee-deep in the worst parts of the internet all week, and you don’t need that in your life.

Helen

Looking-Glass Politics (Mercatus)

It would make sense for protesters in, say, Hong Kong to feel anger. They confront a brutal and despotic regime. Yet the insurgents in Hong Kong are famously tidy and polite—it has never occurred to them to burn banks or vandalize monuments in the style of the Yellow Vests of democratic France.

Arnold Kling, to my knowledge, stands virtually alone in suggesting that the tide of political anger need not have matching political causes. He has wondered, instead, whether extreme private emotions have been diverted by the web into the public sphere. Kling brings up an interesting number: 150.

A challenging take on the current outbreak of political anger - that it’s not political at all.

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-326-480 {
padding-bottom: 67.91666666666667%;
padding-bottom: min(67.91666666666667%, 326px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-326-480 img {
max-width: 480px;
max-height: 326px;
}

How Joe Biden is Winning (Vox)

After the 2016 election, panicked, wounded Democrats settled on a diagnosis. Trump, for all his mania, bigotry, and chaos, had given angry Americans something to vote for. To stop him, Democrats would need to match force with counter-force, polarization with mobilization. They would need to show as much anger, as much populism, as much wrecking ball energy as he did.

Biden is running — and, for now, winning — by defying that diagnosis. He is executing a careful, quiet campaign focused less on thrilling his partisans than denying Trump the boogeyman he needs to reenergize his base. It’s a campaign that frustrates liberal activists and pundits because it repeatedly, routinely denies them the excitement and collisions that structure modern politics. It’s also, for that reason, a campaign that is frustrating Trump and Fox News, which is why they keep trying to run against Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ilhan Omar instead.

Welcome to 2020, where “don’t run as a culture war loon” is finally beginning to get through to progressives. God, isn’t it depressing that electoral politics is easier as a white man because you’re basically running without an identity?

(Caveat to the “Biden has this sewn up” narrative: one of the few Democrats to warn about Trump last time is similarly alarmed again: “I went to a neighborhood the other day and counted 100 Blue Lives Matter signs.”)

The Plan to Scale Back Government Comms (New Statesman)

But on a more prosaic level, the issue preoccupying mandarins is the proposed reform of government communications: not only the planned move to a televised White House-style press conference, but the arguably more significant plan to cut back communications units across Whitehall. 

At the moment, there are around 4,000 communications staff working across more than 20 government departments. The plan is to make individual departments scale back their comms teams to a maximum of 30 people, overseen by four new directors general who will operate centrally. The size of departments varies massively, but the difference is stark: a reduction from an average of 200 people per department, to just 30.

Um, I think I might agree with Dominic Cummings here? Two hundred comms people per government department seems an extraordinary number. Particularly when you consider how hollowed out journalism has become. What if they just had… 150 per department?

Isaac Chotiner interviews Thomas Chatterton Williams (New Yorker)

How do we know the free exchange of ideas is becoming more constricted, as the [Harpers] letter claims?

I’m sure some of your readers on Twitter can already imagine, like, laughing that it’s anecdotal, but I have tons of people who tell me they wouldn’t write certain things, that they wouldn’t say certain things, that they’re not comfortable even entering into a conversation on Black Lives Matter, on Israel, or any of these things, because they didn’t feel that they could even get into a conversation without enormous repercussions that would be detrimental, because they don’t possess the identity that gives them what I would say is the epistemological authority to even weigh in, and so it’s just a land mine. You must possess a particular identity to be able to participate in certain conversations or you face a backlash that comes at you so fast that you can’t even defend yourself against it. It penetrates your workplace.

This is a pretty clear explanation of the debate, and I’m particularly impressed at how TCW handles the “gotcha” question of, oh so how come you support Tucker Carlson’s head writer being fired for racist posts under a pseudonym? “Here’s the thing about cancel culture. It’s not about you violating your employer’s clear rules . . . Being fired for bad performance or for having an alter ego that posts incredibly racist stuff is not cancel culture.”

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-300-970 {
padding-bottom: 30.927835051546392%;
padding-bottom: min(30.927835051546392%, 300px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-300-970 img {
max-width: 970px;
max-height: 300px;
}

Support the newsletter: buy my book.

Quick Links

“Oliver Taylor, a student at England's University of Birmingham, is a twenty-something with brown eyes, light stubble, and a slightly stiff smile. Online profiles describe him as a coffee lover and politics junkie who was raised in a traditional Jewish home. His half dozen freelance editorials and blog posts reveal an active interest in anti-Semitism and Jewish affairs, with bylines in the Jerusalem Post and the Times of Israel. The catch? Oliver Taylor seems to be an elaborate fiction.” The journalist who doesn’t exist (Reuters).

“The segment was a classic example of The Colbert Report’s sly brand of comedy. Now, though, it carries a new weight. This week, [Roy] Den Hollander was named as the primary suspect in the killing of Daniel Anderl and the wounding of his father, Mark, at their home in New Jersey. The men were the son and the spouse, respectively, of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas; investigators speculate that she had been the true target of the person who entered their home on Sunday, reportedly dressed as a FedEx deliveryman.” (The Atlantic)

“Even though women have always done most of the caregiving, both paid and unpaid, it’s never been just a women’s issue. The pandemic made that undeniable. And when Joe Biden presented his new caregiving plan on Tuesday — speaking about his experience as a single father and describing caregiving policies as an economic necessity — he made it explicit.” (New York Times)

Being a Geisha during Coronavirus. (Guardian)

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-964-1456 {
padding-bottom: 66.20879120879121%;
padding-bottom: min(66.20879120879121%, 964px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-964-1456 img {
max-width: 1456px;
max-height: 964px;
}

See you next time!

Happy Thursday!

. . . and I hope you appreciate that not only is the newsletter arriving a day early, but I’m sparing you my further thoughts on “cancel culture”. (Well done to everyone on the entire internet for popularising a nebulous scissor of a phrase, which has no obvious meaning and therefore allows everyone to argue with a straw man version of the other side’s view. Really top-notch work.)

The subject has been pinging round Twitter all week - because of an open letter to Harper’s magazine, and now the resignation of Bari Weiss from the NYT - but I keep wondering if it is actually fascinating, or just fascinating to me. Regular readers will know that I fought hard at my previous workplace to keep a space open for unpopular opinions, and faced a lot of backlash for it, including other journalists trying to spread lies about me and my professional conduct. (Luv 2 keep a secret blacklist.) So I’m probably the worst person to have an objective opinion on the phenomenon.

If the subject interests you, though, here’s Bari Weiss’s resignation letter.

And here is Ross Douthat on what “cancel culture” actually is: “The point of cancellation is ultimately to establish norms for the majority, not to bring the stars back down to earth.”

And here is my revised and expanded version of “woke capitalism”, seen first right here on the Bluestocking, and now on the Atlantic.

One final one: here is the best counter-argument to the Harper’s letter: “Free speech defenders [miscast] their argument as a high level defense of the principles that undergird a free society rather than what they’re actually doing: debating the parameters of socially-acceptable speech regarding race and gender.”

Helen

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-496-344 {
padding-bottom: 144.08502772643254%;
padding-bottom: min(144.08502772643254%, 495.65249537892794px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-496-344 img {
max-width: 344px;
max-height: 495.65249537892794px;
}

Boris Johnson’s Woman Problem (Times)

Of the 92 Downing Street press briefings held between March and June, only three were led by women. There are six female ministers in a cabinet of 22, yet the home secretary, Priti Patel, is the only one allowed out for an occasional appearance. Anne-Marie Trevelyan is about to lose her job running the Department for International Development to Dominic Raab at the Foreign Office. Liz Truss is seeing her Department for International Trade downgraded. The work and pensions secretary, Thérèse Coffey, who oversees a vital department, is ignored. The head of the No 10 policy unit, Munira Mirza, is the only woman in the prime minister’s inner circle of advisers.

I suspect that Downing Street thinks that anyone complaining about this is some kind of metrolib dandy Lady Fancycakes, but the lack of women’s voices at the top of the government is actually leading them into bad policymaking, which people will notice. Dominic Cummings needs to disrupt his OODA loop, pronto.

The Perils of With Us Or Against Us (Atlantic)

A group of policing-reform advocates identified eight use-of-force policies that are statistically associated with fewer police killings. Then they successfully lobbied dozens of cities to adopt their “8 Can’t Wait” measures, such as banning chokeholds, mandating de-escalation, and requiring cops to intervene to stop excessive force. In a sign of the times, their website now leads with a mea culpa. “Even with the best of intentions, the #8CANTWAIT campaign unintentionally detracted from efforts of fellow organizers invested in paradigmatic shifts that are newly possible,” they wrote. “For this we apologize wholeheartedly, and without reservation.”

Because even insufficient radicalism from allies draws ire, many may feel tempted to keep quiet and observe. But “silence is violence,” some insist. That phrase is chanted on the streets, and its logic is being applied to individuals and institutions. In TheNew York Times, the author Chad Sanders urged shunning of the silent, advising his white friends to text their relatives and loved ones “telling them you will not be visiting them or answering phone calls until they take significant action in supporting black lives either through protest or financial contributions.” Those are cult tactics.

This piece, by my Atlantic colleague Conor Friedersdorf, resonated with me, possibly because I’m just a few years younger than him, and so my formative political experiences also happened in the post-9/11 years. I hadn’t realised how deeply the feeling of being told I was on the “wrong side of history” - by opposing the Iraq war - had shaped my instinctive reaction against that phrase, and that idea. I don’t know how to explain the peculiar climate of the time to those too young to remember: the assertion that asking questions was “unpatriotic”, for example. The final episodes of Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip capture the soft censorship of a period now defined by “freedom fries” and “weapons of mass destruction” and a Sun front page of Charles Kennedy as a “spineless reptile”.

(Side note: it’s an irony of life that many of the pro-Iraq War voices from 2003/4 have ended up being more aligned with my views in the present discussion than the anti-war left.)

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-253-450 {
padding-bottom: 56.222222222222214%;
padding-bottom: min(56.222222222222214%, 253px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-253-450 img {
max-width: 450px;
max-height: 253px;
}

From my inbox: A TV industry mole gets in touch to say that Quibi (Bluestocking 145) has acquired a reputation as a “slate scraper”, picking up shows other networks have passed on. However, there is one acquisition which is an incredible piece of television, but you can see why it didn’t get commissioned elsewhere - Murder House Flip - “DIY experts try to do up and sell houses where brutal murders happened”.

Does Anti-racism Training Work? (New York Times)

Last July, in San Francisco, I attended three of DiAngelo’s sessions. “I wasn’t raised to see my race as saying anything relevant about me,” she declared to a largely white crowd in the Mission district’s 360-seat Brava Theater. Her audience had paid between $65 and $160 per ticket to hear her speak for three and a half hours. The place was sold out. “I will not coddle your comfort,” she went on. She gestured crisply with her hands. “I’m going to name and admit to things white people rarely name and admit.” Scattered Black listeners called out encouragement. Then she specified the predominant demographic in the packed house: white progressives. “I know you. Oh, white progressives are my specialty. Because I am a white progressive.” She paced tightly on the stage. “And I have a racist worldview.”

Here’s that 9,000 words on Robin DiAngelo you asked for. I’m interested in her persona, because it’s so built around being a white woman - self-abasing, apologising pre-emptively for being alive, taking up space. I don’t think a male Robin DiAngelo would happen. Also, she grew up in rough circumstances: single mum who died of cancer, then she lived with her dad who kept a room plastered in Playboy centerfolds. As Thomas Chatterton Williams noted, it’s intriguing that she has made a career out of race, not class. “From my perspective, I would never trade my middle-class intact family privilege for her white privilege,” he writes.

And there’s obviously huge self-help/evangelical overtones to what she’s doing. I don’t know, maybe I’m jaded because I’ve spent the week reading about highly armed white nationalist militias, but I think “white fragility” is perhaps less of a problem than white aggression. Unfortunately you can’t get the Boogaloo movement to shell out $160 a ticket to hear that they’re bad people.

(Here is my favourite sentence, about Levi’s, who hired DiAngelo do a workshop: “When I checked in with the high-level manager, he described the chief executive as caring earnestly about racial issues but also noted that this spring, during the pandemic, the company furloughed thousands of its low-level — and most diverse — workers, while the company chose to pay out dividends to shareholders, including to the chief executive, a reward of hundreds of thousands of dollars that he chose not to forgo.” Woke capitalism strikes again!)

Poland’s Rulers Made Up a ‘Rainbow Plague’ ( Atlantic )

Both [Poland’s new president] Duda and state television played some other ugly games in the final weeks of the campaign, delivering a shout-out to anti-vaccination fanatics and accusing [opposition leader] Trzaskowski of serving German and “Jewish” interests (one chyron on state TV read: “Will Trzaskowski Fulfill Jewish Demands?”). My husband, who is Polish and a member of the European Parliament for Trzaskowski’s party, campaigned on the Warsaw mayor’s behalf. Several times, voters told him they wouldn’t take his leaflets, because if he opposed the government then he must be German. “But I don’t even speak German,” he responded, in Polish. It didn’t seem to matter. At the end of the campaign, the Law and Justice leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, declared that Trzaskowski did not have a “Polish heart” or a “Polish soul.”

I’m including this because it is an extremely sobering piece - the Law and Justice party now controls both parliament and the presidency in Poland, and will surely use that power to erode further the independence of the media and judiciary - and its author is my colleague Anne Applebaum. (Yeah, it’s an Atlantic fest this week, bite me.) She is one of the signatories of “The Letter”.

I suspect regular readers will suspect where my sympathies lie in that particular debate, but anyway . . . it is incorrect to argue, as some rebuttals to The Letter have done, that this is purely about hifalutin’ cultural elites who don’t like criticism from Ye Honest Yeomen of Twitter. Tell that to Salman Rushdie - or indeed Anne, who is the Jewish wife of an opposition politician in a country ruled by anti-semitic, conspiracist authoritarians.

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-270-360 {
padding-bottom: 75%;
padding-bottom: min(75%, 270px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-270-360 img {
max-width: 360px;
max-height: 270px;
}

(The Matt-Harriet relationship in Studio 60 is an unwitting metaphor for every journalist’s relationship with Twitter.)

Quick links

“In a less stupid world, if you work for a newspaper your contract would explicitly have prohibited you from having a public Twitter account.” Interesting conversation on the subject of “how anti-woke should you be”. I also enjoyed this line: “I think I may have allowed my anger at dumb wokeness to make me want to become their opposite—and that I started to feel that that could be unhealthy for the kind of writer I want to be. I don’t want to be defined by what I’m not.”

“The ads, according to one critic, are ‘personally abusive, overwrought, pointlessly salacious, and trip-wired with non sequiturs’.” Anne Applebaum on the Never Trumpers running the Lincoln Project (FT).

“They are the little Gaulish village holding out against Rome”. Ben Smith in the NYT on the independent media sites under threat from autocrats in the Philippines, Malaysia and elsewhere.

“The body of his son was barely cold when the ­grieving father was threatened by men from the funeral company. Inside the mortuary of an austere hospital in Lamezia Terme, a city in southern Italy, the dead were not left in peace. Each corpse was now a highly prized commodity, worth ­thousands of euros to Europe’s most ­ruthless organised criminals.” The Financial Times on how the mafia has infiltrated the Italian healthcare system.

“Students continue to report increased anxiety year on year: last year only one in six students recorded their level of anxiety as “low”. The most worried students are white. And, of all students with mental disabilities, more than 70 per cent are female.” (The Critic)

“The lesson for journalists (or anyone) working amidst intractable conflict: complicate the narrative. First, complexity leads to a fuller, more accurate story. Secondly, it boosts the odds that your work will matter — particularly if it is about a polarizing issue. When people encounter complexity, they become more curious and less closed off to new information. They listen, in other words.” How journalists can change minds in a polarised world. (Medium)

Harry Potter and the Reverse Voltaire. (Medium)

“Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself.” Joan Didion on self-respect (Vogue, 1961).

There’s a Betty Friedan-Phyllis Schlafly debate online!

“The less abstract and idealized that platforms are, the less complicated their decisions seem. (This is true for any industry. See: the media!) If we understand early commitments to openness and loose moderation as stances rooted in a desire for growth and minimal labor expenditure, then the recent wave of bans is quite easy to grasp.” This John Herrman observation in the NYT is the twin of my “woke capitalism” thesis, ie look at Facebook’s decisions purely through an economic lens, and suddenly you understand their rationale perfectly.

“At times, it was hard to understand what he meant. He seemed to suggest that his presumptive Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., would get rid of windows if elected and later said that Mr. Biden would “abolish the suburbs.” He complained that Mr. Biden had “gone so far right.” (He meant left.)” This is like something from Austin Powers. (NYT)

“"We will go from the period where it's a choice to open borders, or not, to frank competition for migrants, as there won't be enough," argues Prof Murray.” The looming baby drought (BBC).

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-276-500 {
padding-bottom: 55.2%;
padding-bottom: min(55.2%, 276px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-276-500 img {
max-width: 500px;
max-height: 276px;
}

Sorry this week’s edition was so long. Admittedly, not as long as my book.

Happy Friday!

And it is a happy Friday, because a show I love is now available in Britain. Mrs America, which is showing on BBC Two on Wednesdays and is available on iPlayer, stars Cate Blanchett as Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-feminist activist who was the model for Serena Joy in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Admittedly, had this show been grown in a lab from my very own cells, it could not be more me. It tells the story of the feminist attempt to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, and the birth of the “moral majority” which led to the modern, culture-warrior Republican party.

Cate Blanchett’s cold smile alone is worth the price of admission, never mind her wardrobe.

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-970-1456 {
padding-bottom: 66.62087912087912%;
padding-bottom: min(66.62087912087912%, 970px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-970-1456 img {
max-width: 1456px;
max-height: 970px;
}

If you still need convincing, here’s a phenomenal introduction to the series from my Atlantic colleague Sophie Gilbert, who picks up on the show’s central theme: the creation of the culture war. How did abortion become so central to the US right’s electoral offer? It all goes back to an alliance made by Schlafly.

Also, there are some beautiful bits of cinematography: one of the episode ends with Blanchett, surrounded by men at a party, feeling that she’s being taken seriously at last, only for them to start making crude jokes. Her smile stays fixed, but she backs away from it, like the Cheshire cat. The sound fades, the music rises, the mask stays put.

Helen

Articles That Changed The Way I Think

Richard says: “This is cheating a little bit . . . “all watched over by machines of loving grace” by Adam Curtis. [A scientist’s] extraordinary dedication to finding order in the universe only proved that the world is subject to an all but incomprehensible chaos.” Anna nominates this New Statesman piece on nature writing and eco-fascism, and this article from Quillette explaining gender-critical views.

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-605-1024 {
padding-bottom: 59.08203125%;
padding-bottom: min(59.08203125%, 605px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-605-1024 img {
max-width: 1024px;
max-height: 605px;
}

How JK Rowling Became Voldemort (Atlantic)

Millennials dominate the Harry Potter fandom, a community large enough to have spawned hundreds of thousands of pieces of fan fiction. So it is unsurprising that two major fan sites, The Leaky Cauldron and MuggleNet, have distanced themselves from the books’ author, J. K. Rowling, after she argued last month that “woman” should remain a biological category. The two sites announced last week that they will remove her photograph from their sites, stop linking to her website and writing about her other endeavors, and tag Twitter posts that include news about her with the hashtag #JKR, so users can filter out triggering content from their social-media feeds. To preserve their love of Harry Potter, its fans must erase its author. Rowling, like Voldemort, is so evil that even mentioning her violates a taboo: She Who Must Not Be Named. (Dumbledore would not have approved of this practice. As he tells Harry in The Sorcerer’s Stone, “Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.”)

It’s me, Mario! My favourite response to this piece was the Fan Fiction Big Name who complained I didn’t know enough about Harry Potter to write this. Believe me, I know way too much about Harry Potter. (Please anticipate my TED talk on Das Dobby-tal: House Elves And The Creation Of Capitalism.) My second favourite response was from a priest who offered to explain transubstantiation. Again, sir, I’m all good.

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-576-1024 {
padding-bottom: 56.25%;
padding-bottom: min(56.25%, 576px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-576-1024 img {
max-width: 1024px;
max-height: 576px;
}

Michaela The Destroyer (Vulture)

Coel recalls one clarifying moment when she spoke with a senior-level development executive at Netflix and asked if she could retain at least 5 percent of her rights. “There was just silence on the phone,” she says. “And she said, ‘It’s not how we do things here. Nobody does that, it’s not a big deal.’ I said, ‘If it’s not a big deal, then I’d really like to have 5 percent of my rights.’ ” Silence. She bargained down to 2 percent, one percent, and finally 0.5 percent. The woman said she’d have to run it up the chain. Then she paused and said, “Michaela? I just want you to know I’m really proud of you. You’re doing the right thing.” And she hung up.

“I remember thinking, I’ve been going down rabbit holes in my head, like people thinking I’m paranoid, I’m acting sketchy, I’m killing off all my agents,” Coel says. “And then she said those words to me, and I finally realized — I’m not crazy. This is crazy.

I May Destroy You sounds great, can’t wait to watch it.

Perfection (Paris Review)

For years I could barely write a page. I thought I was becoming a virtuoso of smallness while the grief, which is wordless, occupied an ever-greater volume.

My friend lived in the estates on the bad side of town. Let’s go to the forest, she said when I went over to play. There were three trees in the yard, but if you know where to stand, you can get lost in a forest of three trees. She could do it. She had to. Her mother died when we were nine.

When I was an “emerging” artist I wanted only to finish emerging. But not knowing what I would become, not knowing the circumference of my life—I never expected to solve those mysteries, and once they were solved, I missed them. I didn’t know I’d miss them.

At the twenty-fifth reunion, a presentiment of the grave, now that all the girls from your high school class have borne the last of their children.

Thank you to Rosemary Waugh for sending me this collage-poem-memoir, which is beautiful.

Quick Links

“I am about to set a timer and write, when I notice someone is wrong on the internet. They have linked to an article without looking at its source.” A study in pandemic procrastination. (Lithub)

“For producers of unscripted shows, Quibi offered a rare chance to make their silliest ideas, like Barkitecture (exotic luxury kennels are made for dogs) and Dishmantled, in which two blindfolded chef-contestants are blasted with a cannonload of mystery-food gloop and must identify the ingredients by taste, then use them to reconstruct the dish.” Is anyone watching Quibi? (Vulture)

The correct answer to this is, of course, “ . . . t h e o r p h a n a g e . . .”

It’s kind of amazing how actors have no resistance to terrible ideas because their whole job is people saying stuff like, “could you cuddle a huge fish in a bath?”

What’s Up With Time’s Up? (Hollywood Reporter)

“When I look at my career and see how affected it was by my speaking out about sexual abuse in the industry, it was massively affected in two ways.” This interview with Thandie Newton is just a series of perfectly aimed blows. Incredible honesty about what it’s like to be a light-skinned black woman in Hollywood.

Dominic Raab did a good thing!

Caitlin Moran on the menopause as a comedown is very funny. (Times paywall version here.)

The New Yorker on Slate Star Codex, in a piece whose sheer length is a touching tribute to SSC.

[image error]

(Thanks for all the notes for Maureen Colquhoun, btw, I will send them off this week.)

[image error]
a.image2.image-link.image2-300-970 {
padding-bottom: 30.927835051546392%;
padding-bottom: min(30.927835051546392%, 300px);
width: 100%;
height: 0;
}
a.image2.image-link.image2-300-970 img {
max-width: 970px;
max-height: 300px;
}

This newsletter is free (and such small portions!) so if you’d like to support its continued existence, do buy my book.