Helen Lewis's Blog, page 2

The Bluestocking, vol 144

Happy Friday!

It’s back to our regularly scheduled programming today, after last week’s bonus edition. For new subscribers (hello!) expect a weekly scoop of three recommended articles with discussion, a clutch of “quick links” and then whatever else dribbles out of my brain.

This week’s callout: readers of Difficult Women will know that Maureen Colquhoun, the first openly gay MP, turns 92 next month. She lost her partner of 45 years, Babs, the week the book came out, and has recently been ill. I would like to send her a birthday card with some messages from readers inside, so she knows that people appreciate her bravery, and remember her achievements. If you liked her story, and would like to send a note of appreciation, email me (hit reply to this). Hopefully I can include some cheering messages with my card.

Helen

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What’s Your Pronoun? (LRB)

I’ve​ had the wrong pronouns used for me – ‘he/him’ instead of ‘she/her’ – by two people, as far as I know. One of them was an editor at this paper, who I am told used to refer to me as ‘he’ when my pieces passed through the office. In his mind only men were philosophers. The other was Judith Butler. I had written a commentary on one of her books, and she wrote a reply to be published along with it. In the draft of her response, she referred to me by my surname and, once, as ‘he’. Just a few lines later she wrote: ‘It is surely important to refer to others in ways that they ask for. Learning the right pronoun ... [is] crucial as we seek to offer and gain recognition.’ I wrote her a meek email – this was, after all, Judith Butler – pointing out the error. She replied not twenty minutes later: ‘Sorry Amia! I always did have trouble with gender.’ Swoon.

Enjoyably wonkish article about the search for a gender-neutral third person singular pronoun (ie, not he or she).

Absolutely loving this flex: “In the UK, the 1867 Reform Act extended the franchise beyond property-owning men with the words: ‘Every Man shall ... be entitled to be registered as a Voter.’ Seventeen years earlier, in 1850, Parliament had passed the Interpretation Act, which said that, for the purposes of the law, ‘Words importing the Masculine Gender shall be deemed and taken to include Females.’ Taken together, these two Acts appeared to guarantee some British women the right to vote. Conveniently, they did not.”

And this one: “In 1978, a school board in Florida formally adopted e, together with the accusative form ir. The board offered the following dialogue to show teachers how to use the pronoun, apparently unaware that it was encouraging them to speak in a Dorset accent:

question: Why did e miss ir bus?

answer: E was afraid to go home.

question: Who was e with?

answer: E was by ir self.”

Chaser: For more linguistic wonkery, here’s Kwame Anthony Appiah on the case for capitalising “Black”. (Atlantic)

Marty Baron vs His Reporters On Twitter (NYT)

The report, which was circulated in April, described Post management as “ill-equipped to deal with social media in the modern era” and suggested that managers are more forgiving of mistakes “by white men and newsroom stars than they are of women, minorities and less high-profile reporters.”

(The Times, where management has cultivated stars and taken a relatively softer line on Twitter, has its own challenges, and was forced last week to try to purge the vitriol from its internal conversations on Slack. Its chief executive, Mark Thompson, asked employees to avoid “saying insulting and threatening things about co-workers.”)

American newsroom culture is very different to Britain’s in some ways . . . and very similar in others.

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Don’t Build Roads, Open Schools (Atlantic)

So why don’t we hear about [childcare] when politicians talk about infrastructure? Why all the high-visibility jackets and mechanical diggers? In Britain, it is partly about posh male politicians wanting to seem in touch with regular people: If you went to an exclusive school, as Johnson did, it doesn’t hurt to look like you know which end of a forklift is which. Plus, hard hats still belong to a man’s world—90 percent of construction workers in Britain are male—so they project a kind of macho strength.

The latter point is perhaps the real problem here. In a society where the prime minister is asked whether he “helps” with changing nappies for his newborn child, the idea of child care as women’s (unpaid) work holds the issue back in political discussions. It’s not treated as a real job. Child care seems intangible and mundane—not a new beginning, not “shovel ready,” not something you can stand next to in a hard hat.

Yeah, it’s me. On childcare as infrastructure.

Articles That Changed How I Think

Some reader suggestions: John Rentoul offers this piece, on rejecting hardcore conservatism. Lee nominates “Gender Is Not A Spectrum” by Rebecca Reilly Cooper, saying: “Whatever the feminist equivalent of red-pilling is, this was it.” Lawrence nominates another SSC piece, “We Are All MsScribe”. Further suggestions welcome: just hit reply.

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Buy Difficult Women. Someone’s got to.

Quick Links

“I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South. If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.” Beautiful piece on the statue debate (NYT).

Ian Leslie pointed me towards this list of quotations, gathered by Paul Graham. One jumped out:

“From this place she sent into the world those novels, which by many have been placed on the same shelf as the works of a D’Arblay and an Edgeworth.” – Henry Austen on his sister Jane, in a preface to Persuasion.

I suppose the point of this is supposed to be, hahaha, D’Arblay and Edgeworth, who remembers THOSE LOSERS? That made me sad, because D’Arblay is better known by her unmarried name, Frances Burney, and her Evelina is a funny and sharp novel in its own right, never mind the connections to Austen. (She also wrote an incredible account of her mastectomy without anaesthetic.) Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda is much broader in its comedy than Austen’s scalpel-nicks, but I love it. If you find yourself wishing there were more Austen books in existence, try either of those.

“Who threw the first brick at Stonewall?” No one knows. There might not even have been a brick.

“There is no model for my kind of post-presidency,” [Obama] told the aide. “I’m clearly renting space inside the guy’s head.” (NYT)

“Anal lips and mouth lips are very, very similar, so you talk to people, and it starts to bud into a speciality.” Probably not one to read over breakfast.

Just a lovely Carl Reiner story.

“On some fronts, [Dominic Cummings] has achieved exactly the opposite of what he recommends: rather than hiring top scientists, entrepreneurs or coders to staff the government machine, he has filled No10 with alumni of think-tanks and newspapers, just like every previous administration.” (Hugo Gye in The Critic on the difference between Blog Dom and No 10 Dom.)

“When I look at most of my wardrobe these days, it seems like a curious time capsule from a distant universe. Will future robotic beings pick through my jeans in bemusement, wondering whether tight waistbands were the reason humans died out?” (Financial Times) So much this. My already low tolerance for uncomfortable shoes, stiff fabrics and fiddly crap has been nuked by lockdown. I live in jersey dresses. Even jeans seem a bit much.

Guest gif:

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Sensuous dancing or me desperately trying to unknot my shoulders after a day spent working at the dining table? Either way, I’m still enjoying Fosse/Verdon, on iPlayer.

The Bluestocking: Woke Capitalism

Welcome to a special edition of the Bluestocking.

I can’t claim many flashes of revelation in my life, but one of them came when I read She Said, Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor’s book on the #MeToo movement. Hindsight is a terrible editor of memory: Harvey Weinstein’s fall now looks pre-ordained (everyone knew he was a perv! There were even jokes about it on 30 Rock!) But it took the NYT months of hard shoe-leather reporting to get the first story on Weinstein ready to publish. The women making accusations were nervous; Weinstein himself was bullish; the evidence was mainly testimony rather than documents. And they were taking on someone with deep pockets and a history of intimidating critics into silence.

What happened after publication? Twohey and Kantor’s work was explosive enough that the ground - and the economic incentives - shifted. People who had been afraid of Weinstein were now afraid of being taken down alongside Weinstein. Here’s what I put in my review of She Said:

Rich men accused of being sex pests are like banks: they are mostly too big to fail. But when enough investors finally get nervous, the “sell” sign suddenly flicks on. There is an unedifying stampede for the door. You now can’t find anyone in the film industry with a good word to say about Weinstein. He is the Lehman Brothers of groping.

A while back, a blogger called Jon Schwarz coined the “iron law of institutions”: people with seniority inside an institution care more about preserving their power within the institution than they do about the power of the institution as a whole. There’s a kind of gyroscopic balance to that. I am the King of Ashes!

A similar principle operates when companies - institutions built on maximising shareholder value, or other capitalist principles - struggle to acclimatise to life in a world where many consumers vocally support social justice causes. Progressive values have become a branding tool.

But that is, by and large, all they are. And that leads to what I call the Iron Law of Woke Capitalism: brands will gravitate towards low-cost, high-noise signals if these are accepted as a substitute for genuine reform. (I’m not using the word “woke” here in a sneering, pejorative sense, but to highlight that the original definition of wokeness is incompatible with capitalism.) Brands will tend to embrace the principles of social justice activism only as far as needed to ensure the survival of the business itself. In fact, let’s go further: those with power inside institutions love splashy progressive gestures because they help preserve their power within the institution. They are not being asked to give up anything themselves.

A couple of examples. My Atlantic colleague Yascha Mounk has just written about Emmanuel Cafferty, a truck driver who appears to have been tricked into making an “OK” symbol by a driver he cut up at some lights. The inevitable viral video claimed this was a deliberate use of the symbol as a white-power gesture, and he was promptly fired. He’s a working class man in his 40s from San Diego. Ever wondered why all the regularly cited victims of “cancel culture” seem to be powerful men whose careers rebound just fine? Because by and large, no one cares about the Caffertys of this world. They get taken down and no one hears them fall.

Here’s Mounk:

The loss of his job has left Cafferty shaken. A few days ago, he spoke with a mental-health counselor for the first time in his life. “A man can learn from making a mistake,” he told me. “But what am I supposed to learn from this? It’s like I was struck by lightning.”

I find this quote incredibly haunting, because . . . too right. This behaviour seems random, ungovernable. What can anyone do to protect themselves from this happening to them? Not being racist is not going to save you if the lightning strikes.

As Wesley Yang notes, this dynamic is quite a tactical change for a left which spent the twentieth century fighting against capricious sackings for “troublesome” employees:

June 27th 2020

6 Retweets27 Likes

Mounk also talks about the Civis thinktanker David Shor, apparently fired for tweeting research which found that political violence was less effective at changing minds than civil protest. (At the height of the BLM protests, this was deemed by some to be insufficiently supportive of the cause to the point of being racist.)

Please enjoy this picture of the board of the Civis think tank.

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Two of these are the same man, surely?

Not all woke capitalists are companies. Some are individuals. You might have seen the incredibly disturbing video of a white woman cowering and crying as she is filmed by a man with a record of calling people racist as a prank. He claimed she gave him the finger at the traffic lights, and that he followed her home. Later, once a crowd had gathered, he claimed she called him the n-word. It was a classic “Karen” video: he portrayed her as a snooty white women aware of her social power over a black man.

The man involved in that video, which had 11.5 million views, immediately started selling merch. It was based on the phrases she whimpered as she confronted both the physical threat of a man who had followed her home, and the foreknowledge that she was going to be the latest Karen served up for the internet’s evisceration.

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For when you want a T-shirt that says “I am a misogynist” AND “I am not sceptical enough about stuff I see on the internet”. Wash at 30 degrees.

Like you, gentle reader, I want to see sexism, racism and all other forms of discrimination decrease. But we have to be real about the economic incentives here, and they point towards individuals, and companies, behaving in ways which range from thoughtless and uncaring through to sadistic. For Emmanuel Cafferty’s employer, what’s one random truck driver versus the PR bump of being able to cut off a bad news cycle by saying you’ve fired your “white supremacist employee”? For Twitter, Karlos Dillard’s tweet was a success: great engagement! For Dillard, the video probably made him money in merchandise sales. All of this is “social justice activism” driven not by anti-discrimination principles, but economic incentives.

Let’s take another example of Woke Capitalism. Here’s the New York Times bestseller list:

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Yes, Robin DiAngelo is white. Her book is for white people, encouraging them to think about what it’s like to be white. (It tells white women off for crying if they get upset during anti-racism training, because it will stir memories of Emmett Till among the other participants.) I am boggled by the American book-buying public’s response to Black Lives Matter being . . . to buy a book about whiteness written by a white person.

This is worse than mere navel-gazing; it’s synthetic activism, which makes you feel full of piety and righteousness without having actually done anything. In America, buying a book on White Fragility improves the lives of the most marginalised far less than say, donating to a voting rights charity or volunteering at a foodbank. It’s pure hobbyism. As Freddie deBoer wrote recently: “Because the popular conception of fighting racism, sexism, and homophobia imagines those fights to be matters of moral and mental hygiene — because they define anti-racism et al as things you are rather than things you do — the snake will forever swallow its tail.”

Why is DiAngelo’s book so popular? Again, look at economics. Every big company has recently poured money into “diversity training”. But it is often no more scientifically grounded than Myers-Briggs: the “implicit bias” test is controversial and the claim that it can predict real world behaviour (never mind reduce bias) is a shaky one. But it looks like something solid and quantitative - ooh! a test score! - and therefore metrics-obsessed modern companies (ie all of them) love it. People have been given the idea that confronting their own bias is the best way to address racism. (Also, let’s be honest, there are probably quite a lot of people who have bought White Fragility because they think of themselves as the kind of person who would read a book like that, without actually wanting to read a book like that. It’s a Social Justice Brief History of Time.)

Anyway, here’s Harvard Kennedy School professor of public policy Iris Bohnet:

“About $8 billion a year is spent on diversity trainings in the United States alone. Now, I tried very hard to find any evidence I could. I looked not just in the United States but also in Rwanda and other post-conflict countries, where reconciliation is often built on the kind of diversity trainings that we do in our companies, to see how this is working. Sadly enough, I did not find a single study that found that diversity training in fact leads to more diversity.”

Eight billion dollars a year! Imagine if you put that money into, say, paying all your junior staff a wage which allows them to live in the big city where your company is based, without needing help from their parents. You’d probably do more good at increasing your company’s diversity. Hell, get your staff to read White Fragility on their own time and give your office cleaners a pay rise.

But it’s the Iron Law of Woke Capitalism: better to have something you can point to and say “aren’t we progressive?” than to think about the real problem you’re trying to address. Diversity training is expensive, but it is in the “luxury” bracket rather than the “existential threat to my business if we do this” bracket. More importantly, it offers the minimum possible disruption to your power structures: don’t change the board, just get your existing employees to sit through a seminar.

These are powerful examples of the difference between what I’ve decided to call social radicalism and economic radicalism, but you could just as well describe them as the difference between identity and class. I don’t mean to dismiss the former, by the way. Many groups which face discrimination do so on grounds on both identity and class: women at work, for example, are held back by the perception that they aren’t suited for, say, maths jobs - as well as the belief that they’ll sod off at 30 and have babies. An employer might not see the worth of a black job applicant because he or she doesn’t speak the way they expect - or that applicant might not be able to take the job because their immigrant parents can’t subsidise them through several years of rubbish wages.

In Difficult Women, I wrote that the only question I want to ask big companies who chirrup on about “empowering the female leaders of the future” is this one: Do you have a creche? You can have all the summits and power breakfasts that you want, but unless you address the real problem holding parents (mostly women) back - the difficulty and expense of childcare - then it’s all a hollow facade.

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It is kind of incredible to watch when woke capitalism dramatically misfires, as in Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi ad, in which she solves police violence with soft drinks and double denim.

Let’s move to another arena. Some onlookers (including at least two of the original founders) are baffled by the recent decisive turn at the charity Stonewall towards the T rather than the LGB. This can be explained by woke capitalism, too. In 2013, gay marriage was legalised: by a Conservative government, incidentally, highlighting the distinction between social radicalism and economic radicalism***.

With that, the LGB legislative agenda was nearly exhausted. Most companies were fully on board with hiring gay employees (they don’t cost any more than straight ones) and big brands embraced the rainbow, hiring floats at Pride marches. But if everyone is gay-friendly now, what’s the point of an LGB charity? Stonewall needed an injustice to fight in order to justify its continued existence. Its funding model depends on its “Diversity Champions” programme - where companies pay for a Stonewall kitemark certifying their commitment to LGBT rights. Their diversity champions include BAE Systems, Amazon, Paddy Power and most government departments and universities. (Please do your own “woke bae” joke.) I don’t think I’m being too cynical to suggest that £2,500 is a fair price to be validated as progressive by Britain’s biggest LGBT charity.

That programme helps explain why big companies - and universities - have been slow to acknowledge that there might be reasonable concerns about the abolition of women’s single-sex spaces. Stonewall believes such spaces should be abolished. And if you disagree with Stonewall, you risk losing your Diversity Champion status. (Amusingly, the LGB Alliance, a group set up to challenge Stonewall, is trying to have it investigated by the Equality And Human Rights Commission for failing to take into account the needs of lesbians in its work. The Equality And Human Rights Commission is . . . a Stonewall diversity champion.)

By the way, I don’t know if I’m going mad, but . . . an arms company is a diversity champion now, and the organised left is OK with this? (Some activists have tried to get Pride marches to stop using BAE as a sponsor, given its arms sales to the distinctly unwoke Saudi Arabia.) In happier news, Amazon sponsored last year’s Pink News awards, and Russell T Davies used his acceptance speech to tell them to “pay your fucking taxes”. That’s economic radicalism.

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(This is ill-advisable in Riyadh)

All this context should be kept in mind when we talk about “cancel culture” or “mob rule”. Activists like to challenge criticisms of cancel culture by saying that, come on, we’re just some guys with Twitter accounts up against governments and corporate behemoths. But look at the economic incentives and you realise that, almost always, the capitalist imperative is to yield to activist pressure. Just a bit. Enough to get them off your back.

Sometimes, I support these defenestrations. The removal of Harvey Weinstein from a position of power was undoubtedly a good thing for the world. But the removal of Emmanuel Cafferty from his job driving a truck was not.

And what I come back to, again and again, is the cheap sugar rush of unleashing the tumbrils. Real institutional change is hard; like politics, it is the “slow boring of hard boards”. Convincing a company to toss someone overboard for PR points risks winning a victory that is no victory at all. The pitchforkers are sated. But the corporate culture remains the same. The survivors sigh in relief. The institution goes on.

I get so animated by this stuff because (I hope) I genuinely care about progressive causes. But woke capitalism isn’t just a waste of time and money; I think it’s actively impeding the cause, by siphoning off energy and deluding us into thinking that change is happening faster and deeper than it really is.

All this I’ve learned from feminism, where the contrast between social radicalism and economic radicalism is very apparent. Equal pay is economically radical. Hiring a female CEO for the first time is socially radical. Pride floats are socially radical. Changing building codes to mandate male, female and gender-neutral loos and other facilities is economically radical. (Cheaper to shout down women’s concerns.) Diversity training is socially radical, at best. Providing social housing tenants with homes not covered in flammable cladding is economically radical. Paying your cleaners a living wage is economically radical. Changing the name of a building at an American university is socially radical; improving on its 5% enrolment rate for black students - perhaps by smashing up the mad system of legacy admissions - would be economically radical.

Both forms of radicalism have their uses, but remember the iron law of institutions. For those looking to preserve their power, it makes sense to do the minimum amount of social radicalism necessary to survive . . . and no economical radicalism at all. That’s where activists need to apply their pressure.

This is a special edition of The Bluestocking , the premier source of all my Thinks which are too half-formed for publication elsewhere. Doesn’t that sound appealing? Anyway, feel free to forward this on and encourage your friends to subscribe. And if you would like to buy a book to display ostentatiously rather than read, may I recommend Difficult Women ? The cover is very pretty.

Not long after I finished this, Ralph Leonard published a Medium piece on “woke capitalism” making similar arguments to the ones I’ve made here, but with some different examples. It’s well worth reading: “Say what you will about it, but you have to give to the devil what belongs to the devil: Notwithstanding the current crisis, global capitalism has proved far more resilient, flexible and adaptive than either its harshest critics or most zealous exponents ever expected. You have to admire its perverse ability to assimilate everything that supposedly wishes to ‘dismantle’ or ‘abolish’ it into itself, commodifying it, marketing it, then adding a price-tag. It’s genius.” (There’s also a Ross Douthat piece from last year, which I also discovered when I googled to see how widely used the phrase was.)

*** I’m currently reading Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher, which notes that she had plenty of gay men working for her, without apparently ever being aware that they were gay. It reminded me of something which conservative thinkers will often say privately: the Conservative party is a vehicle for gaining and holding power, which allows it to be extremely ideologically flexible. When and where identity wars are a vote-winner, it will embrace them; when they aren’t, it won’t. A Tory MP told me recently that the party hoped beyond hope to fight the next election on identity rather than economics, given the British economy is likely to still be in the toilet by 2024. A therapeutic crusade against the “loony left” while actually being fairly social liberal in comparison to the average voter would be just the electoral ticket.

The Bluestocking, vol 143

Happy Friday!

This week, there was some brouhaha around the Slate Star Codex blog. Its author uses the name “Scott Alexander” (his first two names, but not his surname), and was distressed by the fact that the New York Times, which had profiled him, insisted on using his full name. (He is a psychiatrist, and is wary of being Googleable by patients.) Tom Chivers wrote about why he thinks the naming was wrong; I’m ambivalent. I think that journalists should resist the idea that naming people in stories is “doxxing”; equally, I would have argued hard not to use Scott’s full name, because it adds nothing to the story.

As an aside, the best, most nuanced writing on internet culture is not happening in the big papers, is it? Places like Unherd are cleaning up. I think that’s because these beefs are considered too “inside baseball”, when actually, a BBC4 programme is reaching far fewer people than the average internet brouhaha. More people are interested in a viral controversy than opera, and yet . . . .

Anyway, Scott deleted his blog, which is a huge shame, because it was one of the most thought-provoking bits of the internet. His review of 12 Rules For Life, which compared Jordan Peterson with CS Lewis, was weird and interesting and unlike anything else I read on the subject. But my favourite piece of his, luckily, is one that I republished at the New Statesman, about a phenomena called the “toxoplasma of rage”. It explains our unerring pull towards edge cases, rather than slam dunks, when making a political argument.

That made me think about the online pieces which have most changed how I think, or which I re-read regularly; or which I refer to all the time. Here’s my list. I would love to hear other nominations for inclusion in a future Bluestocking.

Internet Classics

“Last year, PETA offered to pay the water bills for needy Detroit families if (and only if) those families agree to stop eating meat. . . . People call these things "blunders", but consider the alternative. Vegan Outreach is an extremely responsible charity doing excellent and unimpeachable work in the same area PETA is. Nobody has heard of it.” The Toxoplasma of Rage.

Man Finally Put In Charge Of Struggling Feminist Movement.

“One of the most frustrating things about being on the left is the profound number of clowns who situate themselves beside me. We’ve got generational warfare clowns. We’ve got New Age gibberish clowns. We’ve got conspiracy theory clowns. And of course, we’ve got hippie drum circle clowns. I call these, and others, clowns because their behavior seems primarily aimed at personal performance and tends to be accompanied by self-marginalizing lifestyles and costumes.” Matt Bruenig on “purity leftism”. Also worth reading: What does identitarian deference require?

“What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” I quoted this Claire Dederer piece for the Paris Review in my last book, and by god if I’m not going to quote it in the next one, too.

“The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats. Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense. Everyone’s a detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7. . . People are alienated and worn down and hopeless, and so they see their opportunity to finally be the one pulling over somebody else’s car, lazily tapping the glass with their flashlights. “I’m the one in charge now,” he thinks, as he sends an email to somebody’s boss over a Facebook status he doesn’t like.” Freddie de Boer’s Planet of the Cops.

“Listen up bitches, it’s time to learn incorrect things about someone you’ve never heard of”. Every reading of this denunciation of Buckle Up Twitter brings fresh joy.

Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted (New Yorker). Malcolm Gladwell on how internet activism is hampered by only creating “weak bonds”. Little did Malcolm know it would only take a decade for him to be proved absolutely right.

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PS. All five episodes of Difficult Women on Radio 4 are here.

Can Domestic Abusers Keep Themselves Accountable When No One is Watching? (New Yorker)

In Strodthoff’s groups, men call in from cars, back porches, laundry rooms—anywhere they can find some privacy. They tend to be men living at the economic margins, who might scramble to find bus fare to arrive on time to meetings with parole officers or support services. For many, being able to join their support group from home is a stress reliever. “There’s a comfort level in the home, and a quicker movement to a level of depth,” Strodthoff told me.

Juan Carlos Areán, the program director for Futures Without Violence, a domestic-violence-prevention organization that provides training for batterer-intervention programs, said that the persistence of intervention classes during the pandemic “is breaking a fundamental paradigm in this country—that men will not ask for help voluntarily.” With the criminal and court systems in disarray, Areán said, it’s become clearer that “we have underused other ways to work with people who use violence. This is an opportunity to expand accountability outside of a punitive approach.”

I’ve been interested in perpetrator programmes for a while, because it seems as though we’re making the same mistake with domestic violence that we used to (and still) do with obesity: pour money into treating the effects, not the causes. Rachel Louise Snyder wrote this piece: her book, No Visible Bruises, is excellent.

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How I Became A Poker Champion In A Year (Atlantic)

Seidel stands out from other players for his longevity: He still contends for No. 1, as he has since his career first started, in the late ’80s. That takes some doing. The game has changed a lot in the past 30 years. As with so many facets of modern life, the qualitative elements of poker have taken a back seat to the quantitative. Caltech Ph.D.s now line the tables. Printouts of stats columns are a common sight. A conversation rarely goes for more than a beat without someone mentioning GTO (game theory optimal) or +EV (positive expected value). But despite predictions that his psychological style of play would render him a dinosaur, Seidel stays on top.

I really want to get good at poker.

Quick Links

“The truth is, in the eight months I was with Rolf, I saw plenty of red flags  —  I mean that quite literally  — and I chose to remain silent as a white woman to protect myself.” Liesl Von Trapp’s apology post.

“It cannot have escaped your notice that this period of indictment of whiteness has featured many white people indicting whiteness in a way that excuses them from being indicted.” Bonus Freddie deBoer.

“Why Did The Washington Post Get This Woman Fired?” (New York magazine) A follow-up to the Halloween blackface story, which points out that the Washington Post seems to have been engaged in the age-old practice of “arse-covering” rather than the pursuit of social justice.

Thank You To Everyone Who Reviewed My Book on Amazon, Unless It Was One Of You Bastards That Did This:

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See you next time!

The Bluestocking, vol 142

Happy Friday!

If you have somehow avoided my relentless propagandising for Difficult Women (how?) then you can listen to an abridged version on Radio 4 as Book of the Week next week. It’s read by me, and for some reason I acquiesced to the producer’s request to “unleash my inner actress” and have done a posh voice for Lady Constance Lytton in episode 2.

Incidentally, if you’ve already read and enjoyed Difficult Women, please do leave an Amazon review***. I’ve just finished my new book proposal and I’d quite like someone to fund my decadent millennial lifestyle while I write it, so every little helps.

Helen

*** If you hated it, don’t bother, obv.

Share The Bluestocking

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You Can Check Out Of Twitter, But You Can Never Leave

My old colleague Raf Behr has a new podcast, looking at the psychological side of politics. We talked about negativity bias, smartphones and why information is now too much like Marks and Spencers’ delicious iced buns. I thought my relationship with Twitter was bad, but Raf says it contributed to his heart attack last year. Listen here.

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Jon Stewart Is Back To Weigh In (New York Times)

Maybe it’s better, because you’ve been eloquent during times of crisis in the past, just to ask what you’ve been thinking about and seeing in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing?

I’d like to say I’m surprised by what happened to him, but I’m not. This is a cycle, and I feel that in some ways, the issue is that we’re addressing the wrong problem. We continue to make this about the police — the how of it. How can they police? Is it about sensitivity and de-escalation training and community policing? All that can make for a less-egregious relationship between the police and people of color. But the how isn’t as important as the why, which we never address. The police are a reflection of a society. They’re not a rogue alien organization that came down to torment the black community. They’re enforcing segregation. Segregation is legally over, but it never ended. The police are, in some respects, a border patrol, and they patrol the border between the two Americas. We have that so that the rest of us don’t have to deal with it. Then that situation erupts, and we express our shock and indignation. 

Jon Stewart was my moral lodestar during the 2000s. He always seemed so certain. But outright opposition to Bush suited him better than the Obama years, and he’s now clearly ambivalent about the Daily Show’s approach and legacy (the correct resting state for any journalist or satirist). He still retains his wonderful knack for framing problems, though, as above. Whether you agree or not with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Case for Reparations, it’s hard to come away from it without realising just how deeply segregation is woven into American law, through practices such as “redlining” (refusing to lend to black Americans to keep them from buying homes).

Sometimes the discrimination was even more overt than that: as Stewart mentions later in the interview, some housing developments made it an explicit condition of purchase that homes could not be resold to African-Americans. (Robert Moses, the man who built New York, hated its minority residents, something which reflected in the city’s urban planning.)

All this reminds me of a sharp observation that an American friend made this week. Upper middle-class white US liberals seem very happy to post black squares on Instagram, or attend corporate diversity seminars, but how many of them are comfortable sending their kids to racially mixed public (state) schools, or living in racially mixed neighbourhoods?

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The Time Has Come to Let Go of Harry Potter***

“Pottermore personality quizzes determined that my Patronus was a silver cat and I was owed a yew wand from Ollivander’s, making me feel seen. . . Thanks to my English Lit degree, I can certainly summon a convincing case that Harry Potter should be appreciated independently of Rowling. My instinct is always to see a work of art, no matter what it is, as its own thing. Once you’ve created something and put it out into the world, it’s no longer yours. It takes on a life of its own; it’s like having a literary child.”

I am tempted to say that the overwrought tone is the worst thing about all these “Harry Potter Is Ruined For Me Now” essays, but actually it’s the attempt to shoe-horn references to wizards into painfully earnest discussions of oppression. “Like Remus Lupin at full moon, JK Rowling has become something monstrous.” “Her hate-filled screed has affected me more deeply even than the unexpected death of Cedric Diggory minutes after clutching the Triwizard Cup which turned out to be a Portkey.” “Like Moaning Myrtle in the girls’ bathroom, I too am crying today.”

Now, I don’t like to dunk on the young journalists writing these pieces, but I do want to dunk on their editors. Why are we, as an industry, encouraging twentysomethings to write navel-gazing me-me-me blogs using student journalism phrases like “atop the zeitgeist” in exchange for crap money (and, often, internet hate)? (I know why: they’re cheap.)

There’s a whole generation of mostly white, mostly middle class journalists who - in lieu of solid reporting and editing positions - have only managed to stay in the media by mining their personal experiences for comment pieces. Like White Fragility being top of the NYT bestselling lists, there is a trend for marginalised groups getting turned into something for privileged people to cry over, without handing over the mic to the actual people affected - or even sending journalists out to hear from those communities and report their stories. This type of comment journalism is just Woke How To Spend It, only it’s the opinions which are aspirational, not the chair covers.

It does not feel like a coincidence that journalism has become increasingly culture-war-obsessed as its economics have changed and its routes to entry have become more hostile to anyone outside the upper middle class. No one should be writing comment pieces which say “thanks to my English Lit degree”, because it reveals that the implied reader is another twentysomething with a degree from a redbrick university ****. British audiences are incredibly attuned to class signals, and even “lit” instead of “literature” rings the posh bell. I don’t blame the writers. I blame the editors. And I should know, because I have been one of them.

*** no shit, you’re like 25 (this is a mean joke from someone whose favourite author is still Terry Pratchett)

**** I know the phrase “implied reader” thanks to my English Lit degree

Quick Links

“Living in the middle of London with two young children, I needed to be more pragmatic. I gave up one spare room to bring our nanny into our South Kensington home and prepared the other for a friend who needed to move to be isolated from her husband, a surgeon. . . Conscious of my responsibility towards the additional souls on board, I took stock of what resources I could call on. Trebling our usual order from the Freddie’s Flowers delivery service was the obvious place to start.” Coronavirus, the great leveller. (Financial Times)

The guy who did the Only Fools And Horses theme tune in the style of Elton John has a whole YouTube channel. Joy! Here’s Pulp Dangermouse. And Michael Jackson Dad’s Army. (Thanks to Dorian Lynskey.)

Good post by Alex Hern about QAnon, and AI curation.

“Romano, who once made headlines for writing a review in which he imagined raping the author of the book”. Vulture goes inside the board meltdown at the National Book Critics Circle.

“Mrs Duffy”, a teacher who follows me, has created a Year 9 listening and speaking unit based around Difficult Women. She’s made all the resources available here for anyone else who wants to use them for remote learning.

“I think they’re having an identity crisis because there’s only so many Buzzfeed quizzes you can take until you really have to know yourself. They try to gatekeep 90s culture. I’ve never seen an episode of Friends and I don’t have any intentions to do so.” This piece on what Gen Z think of millennials has cheered me right up. Get over it, grandad.

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Me when reading the internet most days.

The Bluestocking, vol 141

It’s Friday.

This week I have been watching Dave, listening to the Blocked And Reported podcast, and anticipating the end of journalism. On Sunday night, I am doing Book Club Live at Salon (online) which is free with a purchase of the book.

Helen

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My latest story for the Atlantic looks a phenomenon I’m calling “Potemkin Journalism” (yeah, I’ve got really into coining phrases, what can I say?). In this case, the hollow facade belongs to Nigel Farage, who has found a new culture war meme, “migrant boats in the Channel”. He’s been doing something that looks like investigative journalism, but has none of the safeguards designed to ensure that reports are fair: contextual information, for example, and nuance. If I tell you that a man shoved a pensioner, you think, how awful. If I don’t add “to push him out of the path of an oncoming truck”, then I’ve failed you as a journalist.

There a couple of other things in the story that I’ve been wanting to look into for a while, such as the “just asking questions” style of conspiracy theorism (again, a stylistic form which is stealing the clothes of journalism) and the absolutely exquisite culturejacking that is “publish some absolute garbage, and then insist there’s a sinister conspiracy by the MSM not to follow it up”. Read the full piece here.

I had vowed to myself that I would not comment on JK Rowling’s tweets, because my views on the whole subject are well-known - though often misrepresented - and because I wish she had picked her moment better.

But a) everyone seems to be arguing about Fawlty Towers now, and b) I woke up to something which changed my mind, and c) this is not Twitter. If you think the conversation right now should be focused on BLM, please skip this section and read one of the two very good pieces I’ve linked to below.

When JK Rowling published her long, thoughtful post following her initial tweets, it contained a disclosure of sexual and domestic violence.

“I managed to escape my first violent marriage with some difficulty, but I’m now married to a truly good and principled man, safe and secure in ways I never in a million years expected to be. However, the scars left by violence and sexual assault don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you’ve made. My perennial jumpiness is a family joke – and even I know it’s funny – but I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud noises, or finding people behind me when I haven’t heard them approaching.

If you could come inside my head and understand what I feel when I read about a trans woman dying at the hands of a violent man, you’d find solidarity and kinship. I have a visceral sense of the terror in which those trans women will have spent their last seconds on earth, because I too have known moments of blind fear when I realised that the only thing keeping me alive was the shaky self-restraint of my attacker.”

My first, unworthy thought was: well, I hope this makes Daniel Radcliffe feel very bad about himself. That’s not the way to think about this story, of course, as a petty personality battle - but it did unlock for me why I’ve found the whole news cycle around this so depressing.

“Gaslighting” is a wildly overused term, but it’s one with a specific application in regards to male violence against women. Why have the police, and the courts, treated domestic violence so differently to an assault in the street? Because of the legacy of laws which said that a man had the right to “discipline” his wife. That has had all kinds of legal ramifications - the use of a “nagging and shagging” defence for men who kill their partners, for example - but it has also had personal ones. We can’t accept that an otherwise “nice guy” might be a monster to the other people in his home. We still shy away from confronting “a domestic”. People are embarrassed when women disclose that they’ve been victims of violence, particularly men. It makes them feel bad. Is she tarring us all with the same brush? Should I feel guilty on behalf of men?

Ultimately, I’ve come to feel, we don’t want to confront the staggering ubiquity of intimate partner violence (including its male victims, and the children who grow up in homes where they feel unsafe) because it would simply be too awful. It is a scar across society as big, and as ugly, and as hard to look in the face as racism.

This compounds the suffering of survivors: the knowledge that they are inconvenient. Everyone wants to be against domestic violence in principle, but do they want to tell off their mate about the way he checks his partner’s phone without her knowledge? About the way he gets drunk and goes home like a tornado? (“Oh, but he’d never hurt her or the kids.”) Do we want to confront the sleeping bear, draw his rage towards us? Do we want to confront the fact that we live alongside the bear, seeing it on the edge of our vision, but defiantly ignoring it?

All this washed over me when I watched the response to Rowling’s blog post. Because I expected there to be, at least, a brief - admittedly, probably insincere, probably self-serving - acknowledgement of her experience, before the inevitable addendum that she was literally killing people with her views.

Ha. Instead, the Body Shop’s social media manager decided this was an opportunity to do a little light brand-based dunking, like everyone enjoys when tea does it.

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Sorry to hear that. Have you thought about taking it out on some women?

The Bluestocking, vol 140

It’s Friday.

What a week. I’ve been proud to work at the Atlantic, which published an astonishing statement from General James Mattis, who was Trump’s “adult in the room” for several years before realising that was a meaningless title, clearly. I would also recommend the magazine cover story for summer, by Anne Applebaum, about the puzzle of why people collaborate (or rather, the puzzle of why a few people don’t).

Elsewhere, I thought this piece by Yomi Adegoke about not having to perform black pain online was very good.

My guest on The Spark this week was Pragya Agarwal, whose book Sway is about unconscious bias: it was interesting to put racist and sexist assumptions into the context of other ‘faulty thinking shortcuts”.

Helen

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PS. A quick request. Has anyone read anything good on the creative partnership of OutKast’s Andre 3000 and Big Boi? They are as interesting as Lennon/McCartney and I would love to think that someone has written The Big Piece about them. I went looking on Amazon, and found that their unauthorised biography was written by a man who describes himself as “author of the Richard Nottingham books, historical mysteries set in Leeds in the 1730s”. So at least I’m not quite the whitest OutKast superfan out there.

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The Amnesty (The London Magazine)

(PERSON A)         Do you think having an amnesty is a good idea?

‘Amnesty’ comes from the same stem as ‘amnesia’, which strikes me as odd in this case as once all this is out it’s not like it’s going to be forgotten? Like, we’ll receive a notice of receipt and a thank you and then we’ll forget about the inconvenience and the fact that most men – but not all men – are unworthy of being called human.
          When I got to the office, I decided to start filling out this form. You’ve given us a lot of pages.
I started thinking about the two on the train. I couldn’t get them out of my head. I stared them both down on the tube, that homogenous landscape they formed. They all dress the same.
          Two men sitting next to each other at one end of the carriage. There are four main categories: boys, young men, men, old men. One was very young, not boyish, but certainly below twenty and was wearing knee-length shorts and a short-sleeved top, both in matching silk or chiffon, pure cream. His hair was also dyed darker than suited his complexion. He wore leather slip-on shoes, which encased his feet like rounded slippers. He looked uncomfortable, perhaps regretting having so much flesh on show, and he must have been cold, thick hairs were fuzzing the line of his arms and his legs.
      Who first discovered that seeing a peak of a man’s stomach evoked a warm feeling in women? That the more of the stomach he felt a woman see, the more he wanted to give it away? Most keep it completely covered, others are more daring, using mesh or lace. When did that accidental thrill become expected, asked for, demanded, sought out, thought out, manipulated, used for a certain power against us women?

Fiction in the newsletter! And provocative fiction at that.

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Lionel Shriver Is Looking For Trouble (New Yorker)

Shriver is relentlessly contrarian, not only in her political positions—she is a pro-Brexit, anti-woke, #MeToo-skeptical Democrat—but in most aspects of life. She eats only one meal a day: dinner, usually around midnight, often featuring “burn your face off” quantities of chili pepper. She dislikes babies. Before moving to England, in 1999, she elected to live in Belfast for a dozen years during the Troubles. She and Williams leave London every summer, but not for the beach: they have a place in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, with no air-conditioning.

A new Ariel Levy profile is always a treat, and I’m fascinated by Lionel Shriver, who is a bundle of contradictions. The only one of her novels that this profile makes me feel like reading, oddly, is The Post-Birthday World, which “tracks two realities: one in which the protagonist, Irina, has a passionate affair with a snooker player (starting when they stumble into having dinner together on his birthday), and one in which Irina withstands temptation. Shriver renders her characters’ emotions with exquisite specificity and empathy. Irina’s irresolute yearning, in both scenarios, is agonizing and yet oddly reassuring. The message of the book is: It doesn’t matter. Whatever decision you make will have its rewards and its costs, and you will sometimes be tormented by the alternative, because to be human is to doubt.”

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Vanity Is The Enemy

I met Ottessa Moshfegh at her 1920s East Hollywood apartment, where she generously showed me, a stranger, her work space and her home. A Croatian-Iranian witchdoctor from Newton, Massachusetts, Moshfegh is living the entire realization of a self, a life of serous writing since the age of 15. She laughingly tells me in her kitchen that at the crux of breakdown several years ago, she volunteered as a test patient at the Hypnosis Motivation Institute in Tarzana and received 12 free sessions with a recent graduate. Since unplugging herself from the brainwash of polarizing dialectics imposed by fascists, she claims to have “the KKK and terrorists living inside her vagina.”

She is the least couched author I’ve ever met — too honest to negotiate her sentiments in the politics of present day. Fire burns in her brown eyes, one of which is reptilian and flashing, the other ancient redwood and water in space.

[..]

We met on December 1st, 2016. We drove in my truck with my dog to a restaurant near her home where we sat at a quiet table outside. We ordered a whole fish, scallops, linguine con le vongole, asparagus, arugula salad, two glasses of wine for the witchdoctor, and several coffees for me. We had both taken a Valium.

Hat-tip to John Self for this interview with Ottessa Moshfegh by a man she then married. (Ian McEwan also did this with an interviewer. Other examples gratefully received.) Again, I feel like my journalistic style has been found wanting because it never includes exchanges like this:

Are you an other-dimensional being?

Yes, I am.

Quick Links

“How do you manage work and home? I’m lucky. Angelo is a stay-at-home dad.” Sky’s political editor Beth Rigby on her job. I’m glad she mentioned this, because no one yet knows how to solve the puzzle of those “greedy” jobs, where you need to be able to drop everything at a minute’s notice, without having someone else at home full-time.

Is COVID-19 so dangerous because it attacks blood vessels?

Spare me from woke prawnographers. (That said, AVN got such backlash for its BLM bandwagon-jumping that it has pledged to stop using “interracial” as a category.) As I wrote in Difficult Women, it’s nuts that the prawn industry (sorry but I have to make this email SFW) has always treated mixed race relationships like some extraordinary taboo.

The NHS Has Quietly Changed Its Trans Guidance (Spectator). I hope the full story of “puberty blockers” will be told one day, because it’s hard to think of a more vivid parable about how people with good intentions (wanting to help children in distress) can end up doing potentially dangerous things (putting those same children on experimental drugs) and silencing all critics by implying they must be motivated by bad faith. I’m glad that the NHS is now being honest about the situation: some children benefit from delaying puberty, but that comes with side-effects which should be openly discussed with them and their parents.

“After leaving the meditation center, the first evidence he saw was a gas station, and people coming in and out wearing shorts, a scene so characteristic of northern Vermont that he was deeply reassured.” This 33-year-old Buddhist man went into a retreat in mid-March and so got all his coronavirus news in one go, which is probably the optimum way to do it.

The National Geographic has done a special issue on 75 years since the end of WWII, talking to survivors from all sides.

Of all the police videos I have seen this week, I found this one the most disturbing: not the violence, but the numb lack of empathy it must require to walk past a bleeding 70-something man, lying on the ground, bleeding from his ears. Too many American police officers are unfit, clearly not trained in conflict de-escalation and are carrying military-style equipment. The Atlantic published this piece on how to fix the US police; from it, I learned that forces don’t even keep proper data on their use of force. Some of the suggestions have echoes here, for example “overcriminalization. . . there are so many laws that violations are ubiquitous. If everyone is a criminal, officers have almost unfettered discretion to pick and choose which laws to enforce and whom to stop, frisk, search, or arrest.” Anyone who has seen a procession of “drunk and disorderlys” at a magistrates court will know that a country “cannot arrest its way out of addiction”.

Enjoyed this newsletter? Why not share the link: helenlewis.substack.com, or help fund my decadent millennial lifestyle by subscribing to The Atlantic, or buying my book, Difficult Women.

The Bluestocking, vol 139

Happy Friday!

This week, I returned for a guest appearance at the New Statesman, writing the diary, about gaslighting, geniuses and Americanisms. Here’s a nice story from it:

Who’s the idiot who spent three years working on a book, and then published it three weeks before all bookshops shut their doors, all literary festivals were cancelled, and Amazon decided to pause deliveries of “non-essential” items? I am that idiot. While Difficult Women has reached fewer readers than I’d wanted – fingers crossed that an asteroid doesn’t hit the Earth as the paperback lands next year – it has still made the kind of unexpected connections I had always hoped it would. 

Not long after publication, I got a message from Labour’s former Scottish leader, Kezia Dugdale, who had read the “Love” chapter, about the first openly lesbian MP, Maureen Colquhoun. Kez, who came out in 2016, said it had made her cry – and made her feel ashamed she hadn’t known about Maureen before. Like me, she had assumed that the first openly gay MP was New Labour’s Chris Smith. In fact, he was the first to come out voluntarily. Maureen was outed by the Daily Mail in 1976.

Maureen is now 91, and she recently lost Babs, with whom she had shared 45 years of her life. Through Maureen’s family, I put Kez in touch with her, and they are now “coronavirus pen pals”. I’m thrilled. One of the joys of writing a history is reconnecting the past to the present.

The rest is here, and please enjoy this bonus item I had to cut once the Classic Dom story broke.

Here’s a game you can play with your lockdown companion of choice. What is the worst play, film or other artistic experience you would willingly undergo again, just to be out of the house? I’ve settled on going to one of those blockbuster museum exhibitions, where you move at quarter-speed round a packed room, queuing to read boring stuff about the artist’s life inexplicably written on the wall next to the entrance, causing a pile-up five pensioners deep. At this point, I would even voluntarily attend an Edinburgh Fringe show riffing on climate change, wokeness or the Me Too movement. I’d go to a stand-up show whose title was a pun about free speech. “I’d watch something with two intervals,” said one friend, glumly.

Helen

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At the last Fringe, I spent a full five minutes contemplating how much you would have to pay me to see this.

Now I’d go in a heartbeat.

PS. A follow-up to Wednesday’s special edition on conspiracy theories. “Was very struck by the par about conspiracy theories being satisfying because they have an active villain,” writes Bluestockinger (?!) Ben. “Not sure if any of the big studios have data to back up what is just my feeling but I reckon that same thing explains why disaster films are so much less compelling than films with an actual baddy. It's just more satisfying to have a talented character actor embody something and give an interesting speech than have the antagonist be A Big Storm, which you can't distract or figure out or outwit. I wonder if that's why they make fewer of them.”

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Donald Trump, the Most Unmanly President

Not every working-class male voted for Trump, and not all of them have these [old-fashioned masculine] traits, of course. And I do not present these beliefs and attitudes as uniformly virtuous in themselves. Some of these traditional masculine virtues have a dark side: Toughness and dominance become bullying and abuse; self-reliance becomes isolation; silence becomes internalized rage. Rather, I am noting that courage, honesty, respect, an economy of words, a bit of modesty, and a willingness to take responsibility are all virtues prized by the self-identified class of hard-working men, the stand-up guys, among whom I was raised.

And yet, many of these same men expect none of those characteristics from Trump, who is a vain, cowardly, lying, vulgar, jabbering blowhard. Put another way, as a question I have asked many of the men I know: Is Trump a man your father and grandfather would have respected?

The conclusion here - “Trump’s lack of masculinity is about maturity. He is not manly because he is not a man. He is a boy” - also applies partially to Boris Johnson, who also relies heavily on the idea he’s a cheeky scamp.

Postscript. He took it like a man.

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrumpGreat News: The boring but very nasty magazine, The Atlantic, is rapidly failing, going down the tubes, and has just been forced to announce it is laying off at least 20% of its staff in order to limp into the future. This is a tough time to be in the Fake News Business!

May 27th 2020

20,496 Retweets100,582 Likes

Surviving It All (New York Magazine)

Marga Steinhardt was born in Witzenhausen, a town in central Germany, in 1927, five years before Adolf Hitler came to power. I met her in November 2019, when we spoke for hours in the Brooklyn living room of her daughter, whom she was visiting. As we’d parted, I’d asked if I might visit her in Washington in the spring to talk more, but she’d waved me off: She’d be on a lengthy cruise, she told me. If I wanted to come later in the year, when the weather was better, I’d be welcome; “That’s if,” she said, laughing, “I’m still alive.”

This story is just extraordinary, with a casual revelation halfway through that will leap your heart into your mouth.

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“I Had To Choose Being A Mother”

If day cares closed because of the novel coronavirus, Aimee Rae Hannaford expected her family to fare better than most. She worked full time as the chief executive of a tech company while her husband stayed home. He’d been taking some time off from his own tech career, managing a rental property while considering his options. He could look after their 3-year-old son, she thought — at least for a while.

“That lasted a grand total of three days,” Hannaford said.

Once her son was home full time, she realized they’d need a different solution. She was holed up in the guest room, wielding dual-monitors at her desk. Her husband was exhausted. “I can’t do it,” she remembers him saying: “I can’t watch him for this long.”

Perhaps the most telling line of this story is “Hannaford’s husband declined to comment for this story”. I’m guessing that he felt ashamed to say he couldn’t cope with parenting a toddler for every waking hour. And yet we expect mothers to do that, because of. . . nature, or hormones, or something. It’s all such crap. Humans are tribal animals. We didn’t evolve living in atomised nuclear families. But companies won’t take on the burden of supporting unpaid care, and neither will governments, so it all gets shoved on to parents (and disproportionately on to women) to keep the economy going. It’s a bad bargain and it should be renegotiated.

Chaser: “They found that mums were only able to do one hour of uninterrupted work, for every three hours done by dads.”

I am John’s (uninterrupted) complete lack of surprise.

This squares with all the Second Shift research, and work done since: patterns established during maternity leave makes mums the “supervisory parent” and dads the “additional parent”. Fascinated to know if there’s any business research about successful ways to jointly manage a project, because it feels like that’s what is needed: methods for sharing the mental load of “what’s for lunch” and “has X done his homework” and “does the washing machine need emptying”, rather than one partner saying “just tell me what needs doing and I’ll do it!”

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I mean. Maybe I’m wrong and it’s brilliant? But why is one of them in a top hat? Is that Fosters in her bra? Also, tag urself, I’m the anguished monk.

Quick Links

“At this, the mystery woman went “Ugh!” with a theatrical shudder, and I realised she was Yoko’s personal shudderer.” Philip Norman on rock biographies.

“He has a courtly way of speaking, mixing southern good manners with faintly European pronunciations; friends are always referred to as if he were introducing them to an ambassador at a party: ‘Annette de la Renta and Oscar de la Renta, very close and dear friends of mine’ and ‘the late Lee Radziwill, the sister of Jackie Kennedy, who was one of my greatest friends in my life, and it was not a known fact we were that close’.” Andre Leon Talley was one of my favourite bits of America’s Next Top Model, and Hadley Freeman interviewing him is a treat.

“The idea that institutions set up 50 years ago, sometimes 100 years ago, sometimes 300 years ago, are inevitably the ones that will make sense of the future is something that must at least be debated. Especially now.” The Spectator’s arts critic defends asking a provocative question on Twitter: would it be so bad for British theater to fail?

This week in the Old Person’s TikTok digest: Take on Me played on a washing machine.

“There’s a wonderful study of crowds in the French Revolution by a French historian, written in 1952, Lefebvre, where he says perhaps it’s only in the crowd that people lose their petty day-to-day concern, and act as the subjects of history.” The psychologist Stephen Reicher, a member of SAGE, on why crowds are unfairly maligned.

“It’s a little bit of a frenzy, and I am uncomfortable with that,” [Christian Cooper] said. “If our goal is to change the underlying factors, I am not sure that this young woman having her life completely torn apart serves that goal.” Jon Ronson has rejected comparisons between the Justine Sacco case and this incident in Central Park, where a white woman called the police on a man who asked her to muzzle her dog, stressing that he was “African American”. But they do have one point of comparison: for as long as America doesn’t have racial justice, there will be individual people on whom all that pent-up anger gets vented.

“This is the crux of the problem with Manion’s book. She makes strenuous efforts to claim that her subjects ‘embraced’ transgender identity as it is understood today.” Selina Todd reviews Female Husbands: A Trans History. I’m with Todd; I have no idea why you wouldn’t preserve the ambiguity of these stories, and accept that modern notions of gender identity and sexuality simply aren’t applicable to the eighteenth century.

“The Curtis theory, as demonstrated in Yesterday, is that the Beatles’ songbook is so objectively, undeniably, timelessly great that, even in the hands of a modestly talented schmoe, it would rule the world.” Dorian Lynskey on Yesterday.

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It’s just that the “comedy” bits of Shakespeare are bad enough when done by, like, Mark Rylance. Incidentally, which play do you think this is? I’m going with Taming of the Shrew. Amazing if this is supposed to be Lady Macbeth goading her husband into murder by threatening him with a medieval banjo.

Also which one of them is supposed to be drunk?

Am I drunk?

What is drunk?

Anyway.

The rest is silence. Probably followed by a loud burp.