The Bluestocking 337: Blue Zones and stupid wars

thematic folders labelled Fleeing, Flying, Falling

Happy Friday!

This week, I watched Tucker Carlson interview JD Vance, who is the closest thing that MAGA World has to an in-house intellectual (Atlantic gift link). His politics (and Carlson’s) are isolationist, protectionist and nativist. When Vance called the invasion of Iraq a “stupid war,” I felt approximately 9 billion years old. I can’t think of anything that better sums up the schism between the MAGAverse and the pre-Trump Republican party than its changing attitude to foreign intervention. Remember freedom fries? Those days are gone.

Helen

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Photo: Rob Stothard

The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates (New York magazine, £)

Coates traveled to the region on a ten-day trip in the summer of 2023. “It was so emotional,” he told me. “I would dream about being back there for weeks.” He had known, of course, in an abstract sense, that Palestinians lived under occupation. But he had been told, by journalists he trusted and respected, that Israel was a democracy — “the only democracy in the Middle East.” He had also been told that the conflict was “complicated,” its history tortuous and contested, and, as he writes, “that a body of knowledge akin to computational mathematics was needed to comprehend it.” He was astonished by the plain truth of what he saw: the walls, checkpoints, and guns that everywhere hemmed in the lives of Palestinians; the clear tiers of citizenship between the first-class Jews and the second-class Palestinians; and the undisguised contempt with which the Israeli state treated the subjugated other. For Coates, the parallels with the Jim Crow South were obvious and immediate: Here, he writes, was a “world where separate and unequal was alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others was policy.” And this world was made possible by his own country: “The pushing of Palestinians out of their homes had the specific imprimatur of the United States of America. Which means that it had my imprimatur.”

That it was complicated, he now understood, was “horseshit.” “Complicated” was how people had described slavery and then segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”

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Ta-Nehisi Coates, who left journalism a few years ago to write fiction, has returned with a collection that includes an essay on Israel and Palestine, which he wrote after a 10-day visit to the region last summer. This interview with him about that experience is well worth reading, because he makes some good and fair points about the greater sympathy to the Israeli point of view in the US media. But I find his overall analysis of the conflict bafflingly reductive.

As it happens, I visited Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Ramallah six years ago for about the same amount of time as Coates did, and was struck by the two-tier society in the same way that Coates was. (A theatre company that tried to work with both Israelis and Palestinians had its rehearsals constantly interrupted because the Palestinians were arbitrarily made to wait for hours at checkpoints.)

But I also visited Jordan a few years later, where our guide said, not ten minutes after we left the airport, “Do you know who is responsible for all the troubles in the world? It is the Jew.” And I remember the exhibits at Yad Vashem about how Jewish refugees were turned away by the rest of Europe and America in the 1930s. In light of that, calling their peers who made it to Palestine a decade later “settler colonialists” feels obscene.

Israel is complicated. It’s not a direct re-run of the Jim Crow South. Benjamin Netanyahu is a corrupt authoritarian, and the United States is far too willing to let him do whatever he wants. But Hamas are misogynist, homophobic anti-semites who rule like gangsters. Surely you can be in favour of a ceasefire—and think that the last few months in Gaza have been an avoidable humanitarian disaster—while acknowledging that complexity?

PS. One of the books that I’ve found most insightful in helping me understand the psychology of the Israeli establishment has been Ronen Bergman’s history of Mossad, which I thought of again amid the pager explosions. Bergman makes the case, essentially, that Mossad pursues a “madman strategy”—deliberately doing things that are outrageous, daring and illegal under international law to project a mythology of ruthlessness and invincibility.

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Photo by Alexander Coggin for GQ

Has Piers Morgan Figured Out the Future of TV News? (GQ)

Morgan’s critics argue his closeness to Trump borders on sycophancy; Morgan defends himself by arguing that their rapport has given him more opportunities than most to hold the former president to account. (Trump was unhappy with his interview on Uncensored after Morgan pushed him on false claims about the 2020 election being “stolen”.) Credit where it’s due: Morgan is rarely afraid to put interviewees through the wringer – whether that be Trump, Tate, or holding government ministers like Matt Hancock to account during the pandemic.

Not that it always takes a bludgeoning approach. When Morgan announced his Fiona Harvey interview on X, for example, many people were outraged: how could you give airtime to someone’s stalker? “It raised a lot of ethical issues,” Morgan says. “[But] there was no actual evidence that she’d ever been convicted or even been to court. We couldn’t find any, nor could anyone else. So I said, ‘Well, until we’ve established that, I think she’s entitled to her right of reply.’”

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Oli Franklin-Wallis goes behind the scenes on Piers Morgan’s talk show, Uncensored, which is now limited to YouTube. This might be an unpopular opinion, but I have a soft spot for Morgan, who is a being of pure tabloid journalism—he just likes controversy and winding people up. There’s no more point getting angry with him over that than being annoyed that your cat ate the Sunday Roast you left out on the sideboard.

I’m glad that this profile got into the Baby Reindeer stuff, because I think a lot of people moralised about Morgan having Fiona Harvey (the real life Martha from Baby Reindeer) on his show, whereas they didn’t apply the same “don’t put fragile people in the spotlight to benefit your own career” standard of judgement to Richard Gadd, who just won an Emmy for Baby Reindeer.

Disappointing, though, to see a reference to Imane Khelif as a “cisgender woman,” when most people will read that as implying that she is biologically female—and therefore any questions over her boxing in the female category are innately ludicrous. The fact that GQ won’t honestly tell people what the argument is actually about rather suggests why Morgan is so popular. He might be offensive, but that’s refreshing when other people are euphemising away the truth.

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Quick Links

1. I love the Ig Nobel prizes. One of this year’s winners debunked the idea of “Blue Zones” where people all live to 120 because they eat oily fish and shit like that. Instead, the researcher argued, these Blue Zones are places with few birth certificates and widespread pension fraud (ie people collecting dead their 113-year-old granny’s benefits).

2. This clip of Sam Altman explaining how he takes notes—on PAPER, with a PEN—has given me much joy. It’s like watching Ian McKellen explain acting on Extras.

3. “There are few other libraries in the world where you might open a drawer of photographs marked Gestures, to find thematic folders labelled Fleeing, Flying, Falling, along with Denudation of breast, Grasping the victim’s head, and Garment raised to eyes (Grief).” Love a weird library. The newly revamped Warburg Institute looks very fun (Guardian).

4. “Our argument is that Britain’s problems are very simple. We have banned investment in most of the housing, business premises, infrastructure, and energy supply we need.” My favourite rightwing thinker, Sam Bowman, has a list of reasons why Britain’s economy might be so sluggish (Sam Bowman, Substack)

5. “The most obvious answer to the question of why Labour are saying they are in a massive hole and making unpopular and politically difficult cuts is: they think they are in a massive hole.” Tom Hamilton reviews Keir Starmer’s miserabilism (Substack).

6. “One of the worst mistakes we ever made was making email instantaneous. We should have built in a two-hour buffer unless you flagged the email as time-sensitive or urgent. Why is that? Because now everybody has to check their email every 10 or 15 minutes on the off chance that someone has sent them a time-sensitive email.” Thanks to The Browser for this link to a Rory Sutherland article on something that I keep thinking about—should we optimise for efficiency? Who actually gains from that? The choice becomes an obligation. (Behavioural Scientist)

7. “Derek Sullivan, a cataloguer at a public-library system in Pennsylvania, told me that AI-generated books had begun to cross his desk regularly. Though he first noticed the problem thanks to a recipe book by a nonexistent author that featured ‘a meal plan that told you to eat straight marinara sauce for lunch,’ the slop books he sees often cover highly consequential subjects like living with fibromyalgia or raising children with ADHD.” Max Read on AI slop flooding the internet (Substack)

8. “Investors have to sign up to an operating agreement that states: ‘It would be wise to view any investment in [OpenAI’s for-profit subsidiary] in the spirit of a donation,"‘ and that 'OpenAI ‘may never make a profit,’ a truly insane thing to sign that makes any investor in OpenAI fully deserving of any horrible fate that follows such a ridiculous investment.” Reading stuff like this makes me wonder if OpenAI will one day suffer an Lehman-like collapse (Ed Zitron).

9. Gia has independent mattresses zipped together. This sounds game-changing (Substack).

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