ICYMI: Yesterday, The Atlantic published my June issue cover story, on the MAGA Manosphere. Here is a gift link.

Helen

From Riker to Rey

Did “diversity” and “woke” ruin TV? This post argues no—the problem with some recent series a reductive and faddish approach to personal stories, and a preference for solipsism over external problem-solving. Oh, and an over-reliance on orphans.

Every single character [on the latest Star Trek franchise] can be summed up with a single adjective and noun combination, because they only have one defining trait. The “rebellious orphan”, the “gay nerd”, the “awkward girl” and “the handsome bully”. That’s never what Trek was. On paper, Riker could have been an awful character. A sex-crazed, arrogant asshole, but that’s not who he is. Yes, he fucks (A LOT), but he loves people. He loves women (even really freaky ones), but he has integrity, he has discipline and strong convictions. He’s brave and fair. When he speaks to his away teams, he doesn’t talk down to them, but gives them comfort and motivation. If he were written now, he’d just be “guy who likes sex.”

[…]

I’m not saying characters can’t have internal struggles, but when that’s ALL they have, it rings so shallow. And this, lads, is the crux of the issue. Whether it’s new Trek, Star Wars, or Amazon’s Lord of the Rings show, everything feels so lazy and hollow because every character feels the same. We aren’t allowed to watch them grow based on how the external world affects them. Every single one of them is “But what about ME?” They are more important than anything else in the universe.

I particularly enjoyed this piece’s spirited defence of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was a deeply philosophical television show. Years ago, when Sajid Javid got appointed culture minister, and was outed as a Trekkie, I got invited to do one of those ho-ho-ho lighthearted items on the Today programme about how this was just as valid as being into the Ring Cycle or Chekhov. (A classic of the genre was when I was invited to explain the appeal of Grand Theft Auto and John Humphrys wrapped up the item with the words: “I don’t see what’s wrong with chess, myself.”) Anyway, I duly dropped a load of bombs about the Prime Directive, the ethics of genociding the Borg etc. Don’t think they were quite ready for that at 7am.

PS. On a related note, here’s Leigh Stein on Yesteryear, the buzziest novel of 2026, which is about a tradwife influencer who gets transported back to the 1800s. The problem, Stein finds, is that the author doesn’t have any curiosity about what life used to be like, or the everyday struggle of homesteading: “[Caro] Burke does not give Natalie any 19th century conflicts, trials, or tribulations to face. She just has her main character repeatedly injure herself, every time she tries to run away.”

Keeping Up With The Millers

‘In the midst of a war in Iran in which more than 1,700 civilians have been killed so far, including more than 250 children, Katie [Miller] cackled with Lara Trump about the texts Trump had been sending his daughter-in-law with videos of the latest US bombings. ‘I love that,’ laughed Katie. ‘He’s just like all of us, sending, like, their best hits around, like when you did something great on the internet.’ [. . .]

On the pod, Katie negs [her husband] quite a bit. In one episode, she calls Stephen a “Bridezilla” (he wanted a big wedding, she didn’t). She told Cheryl Hines that if someone comes up to them and wants to start an argument (“always a liberal white woman, 100 per cent of the time”), it’s she who steps forward, while he “just goes quiet and walks away or looks down”.’

I’m fascinated by Katie Miller, wife of Trump’s effective prime minister Stephen, and now a podcaster. I learned from this excellent Jemima Kelly profile that she has a YOLO tattoo on the inside of her lower lip. Kind of an ironic thing to describe as your biggest regret. (FT, £).

I feel seen. Cartoon by Asher Perlman.

Quick Links

1. This 1974 clip of Bob Fosse made me rethink everything I thought I knew about Michael Jackson. Honestly, it felt like the first time I saw cycladic art and was like, Oh that’s what you were going for, Picasso.

2. Francisco Ferreras and Audrey Mestre were the first couple of free diving. Then he had to take a break from the sport and encouraged her to go for a world record attempt instead. She died after her air tank turned out to be almost empty. Did he kill her—either through negligence or premeditated murder? Ferreras says a new Netflix free diving drama passes itself off as fiction but is really a libel on his reputation. (New York Times, gift link).

Parish Newsletter

Two friends of the Bluestocking have new novels out: my old college mucker is milking the Strong Personal Brand of Wilf, her cairn terrier, by calling her romance novel The Underdog; while , one of the wisest people I know, is now fighting crime with Shrink Solves Murder.

See you next time! On Wednesday, I’m recording an episode of Past, Present, Future at Regent Street Cinema, after a special screening of Good Night and Good Luck. Tickets here.

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Do not adjust your newsletter—I’m dropping into your inbox a day early to tell you about the cover story I’ve written for the latest issue of The Atlantic.

In it, I look at one of the most important intellectual underpinnings of the New Right, which is, simply put, the idea that feminism has made society weak (and women unhappy).

One contention is that politics has been deformed by empathy—which is feminine, and therefore “toxic” or “suicidal”. Another is that men are better suited to political office, business success and religious leadership because their higher levels of testosterone make them risk-takers. Women, by contrast, are the HR managers of the world, always telling you stop that and don’t do this.

This ideology might be called masculinism, and it’s everywhere:

Woman-bashing plays well on social media and sells lots of ads for crypto, sports betting, and supplements. You can make good money telling men that they’re the truly oppressed sex. But this isn’t just a movement of grifters exploiting a quirk of the algorithm. In the past decade, one of the New Right’s major challenges has been to retrofit a consistent ideology onto the electoral power of Donald Trump. Masculinism has been a great gift, because factions with different views on, say, protectionism or Israel or Big Tech can all agree on the overreach of feminism and the need for a return to traditional gender roles. Far from being a fringe belief system, masculinism has become the single most important force uniting the American right, bringing together an unlikely constellation of pastors, posters, senators, preachers, influencers, podcasters, and fanboys.

Gen Z Boss And A Mini

One story that didn’t make the final edit of the piece, but which I consider to be emblematic of the dynamics here, is the infamous “Gen Z boss and a mini” video.

In this short clip, a group of twentysomething women who work at a skincare company stand in a circle, clapping and identifying themselves by cutesy characteristics—“itty bitty titties and a bob.” The video initially went viral as an amusing example of workplace cringe, but soon hit the masculinist internet, racking up 44 million views on X, where it still provokes fury to this day.

“This is cancer,” reads a typical response. “No wonder modern women can’t get anyone to date them.”

Again, this is a skincare company. I simply do not believe that these women got DEI-ed into their roles over the heads of qualified straight white men! But something about watching young women at work being silly drove some people on the internet absolutely spare1. Cartoons Hate Her wrote a great essay about the dynamics underpinning this outpouring of hatred, framing the gender war as a class war. Women are assumed to be doing well in the modern economy, and that must be at men’s expense. How dare these women piss about and get paid for it while men are lumberjacks?

Or as I write in the piece:

The MAGA movement is often framed as a reaction to the first Black president, and to a growing Latino population. But the multiracial appeal of the manosphere and Trump’s 2024 inroads with young minority men point in a different direction. “People ask me what the New Right is furious about,” the author Laura Field, whose book, Furious Minds, describes the intellectual underpinnings of Trumpism, told me. “And I think a good shorthand for that is they’re furious about their own loss of status in society over the last few years and the elites who made that happen, and I think that the pithiest short version of that is that it’s the women. It’s the women who took their status.”

Beyond The Manosphere

What I wanted to do with this piece is look beyond the “manosphere”, which is often portrayed in sensationalist terms, with a focus on the splashiest, stupidest attention-seekers. (I’m looking at you, HSTikkyTokky.)

There are also serious masculinist thinkers out there, like Charles Cornish-Dale and Helen Andrews, who argue that society is being degraded or even destroyed by “feminization”. There are policy wonks like Scott Yenor of the Heritage Foundation, who wants to introduce workplace discrimination in favour of married men (the “family wage”). And there are pastors like the Calvinist firebrand Douglas Wilson—who wants to repeal the 19th Amendment, which gave women the vote—who have moved from the fringes to the uncancellable mainstream.

Not all of masculinism’s ideas are bad or wacky. There’s an argument to be had about the acceptability of single-sex educational institutions (I went to one) even if Yenor’s rationale is that women inevitably corrupt military colleges. American universities did go through a weird cancellation-happy phase at the same time that they massively expanded their (female dominated) bureaucratic apparatus. (Correlation or causation? Who knows.) Testosterone is associated with violence and risk-taking—this was even the argument given by Harriet Harman, once upon a time, for why we needed diversity in boardrooms. “Lehman Sisters”, she argued, wouldn’t have been so reckless.

At the same time, what I found over and over again was vibes-based handwaving presented as “common sense” or “everyone knows this, deep down.” Helen Andrews and I had an interesting exchange over her thesis that the law could not remain interested in justice if it were female-dominated, and medicine would similarly become too touchy-feely to function properly:

Later in the essay, Andrews offered a testable proposition: “If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?” As it happens, the labor economist Revana Sharfuddin has crunched the data on factories in the Second World War—one of the greatest periods of “demographic feminization” in American history—and found no evidence that they became paralyzed by cancel culture and petty HR disputes.

When I asked Andrews about this, she noted that wartime automobile and electrical factories were still essentially segregated by sex, and that even so, some managers hired counselors to help them deal with their new workforce. “For what it’s worth, the counterargument that most landed with me was the example of communism,” she wrote in an email. “Women were well represented in medicine and science in the Soviet Bloc, and their society didn’t collapse—well, it did, but probably not because of the women.”

I found this all incredibly interesting. But this is not the level at which the conversation is happening! The internet rewards tribalism, controversy and sweeping claims. Cornish-Dale’s book The Last Men is elegantly written, but his tweets as “Raw Egg Nationalist” are racially inflammatory and therefore viral. One pastor told me that he saw his internet persona:

“like the Apostle Paul arguing and lecturing in the hall of Tyrannus,” an important period of evangelism for the early Church. When I checked his X feed later, he was talking about “Jewish sodomites” and reposting an account called @IfindRetards.

Gynofascists assemble

The essay ends with a group of rightwing anons on X having a go at anti-DEI activist Christopher Rufo, because he won’t agree that white men are the most oppressed group in history: “When he described this view as ‘brain damaged’ and invoked a little-known American phenomenon called slavery, he was besieged with complaints.”

Unfortunately, this is where we are. Masculinism is so popular algorithmically that it has attracted hordes of bloviators, because they can say vibesy things with no evidence, completely unchallenged.

For a recent example, here is U.S. radio personality Adam Carolla explaining to the Triggerlads that “the male brain wants to do stuff . . . women want to talk it out, have a meeting.” This leads to something he calls gynofascism, where the world is going to hell in a handcart because Donald Trump wanted to rebuild the Palisades but LA Mayor Karen Bass (a known woman) wanted to do bureaucracy instead.

This clip is such a rich text. Are we absolutely sure that we want to use Donald Trump as the exemplar of someone who Gets Stuff Done? He can destroy stuff, sure—the East Wing, shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, and so on—but his record on completed projects is a little bit more sketchy. Meanwhile, the “feminine” coronavirus Carolla hated so much response was led by … Justin Trudeau and Gavin Newsom (and, let’s be honest, official Covid-era president Donald Trump). So not women, then. Just left-wing men, whom you have decreed are honorary women.

Also, Carolla asserts that he has been “saying this stuff for 20 years” — in other words, since 2006, when 3% of S&P companies were led by a woman, and women made up just 16% of Congress. What is the non-zero level of female participation in public life that he doesn’t consider to be gynofascism? And that’s before we get to the sheer joy of three male podcasters (podcasters!!!) sitting around talking about how women just love yakking away without getting anything done.

A Feminine, Nervous, Hysterical, Chattering, Canting Age

During the course of my research, I found this excellent quote diagnosing the problem with the modern, feminized world:

“I am so far from thinking, as you set forth the other night, that there is not enough woman in our general life, that it has long been pressed home to me that there is a great deal too much. The whole generation is womanised; the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don’t soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been. The masculine character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear reality, to look the world in the face and take it for what it is--a very queer and partly very base mixture--that is what I want to preserve, or rather, as I may say, to recover; and I must tell you that I don’t in the least care what becomes of you ladies while I make the attempt!"

When and where is this from? These words are spoken by Basil Ransom, a character in Henry James’s novel The Bostonians. It was published in 1886, back when women didn’t even have the right to vote.

You can read my whole essay here, with this gift link. (I’ve also done the audio version, if you prefer to listen.) And if you’d like to support my work, do subscribe to The Atlantic.

Helen

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This week I continued the new theme of my life, “visiting islands that begin with a G”. You can get to Guernsey very easily from London—it’s a 40-minute flight in a prop plane from Gatwick with Aurigny airlines—and the bailiwick also includes the islands of Alderney, Sark and Herm. The population is around 65,000. Is that cosy, I asked the literary festival volunteer who picked me up from the airport, or claustrophobic? “Put it this way,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to have an affair.”

I had planned to get the ferry onwards to car-free Sark, which featured in the most recent Cormoran Strike book, but a combination of bad weather and a post-tortoise cold made me reconsider. Instead, I went to Castle Cornet, down at the harbour, and felt as though I had accidentally fallen through a portal into Rob Hutton and Duncan Weldon’s heads. There are four (!) military museums on the site. If you’ve ever wanted to see a diorama of Guernseyan medieval peasants trying to fight off better-equipped French halberdsmen, this is your chance. They fire the big cannon at midday. Another festival volunteer told me that you can enter an auction to be the one to fire it on Liberation Day, which is tomorrow.

Guernsey is a crown dependency, but not part of the United Kingdom, and the king is known here as the “Duke of Normandy”. It got its special status as part of a sweetheart deal in the Middle Age, when England lost the rest of its Norman territories, and has maintained an arms’ length relationship with the mainland ever since. Today, there is no VAT for residents, and a flat 20% tax rate. (On my way to Ecuador last week, I met a finance guy in the lounge who was on his way to Jersey. He described it as “an open prison for millionaires.”) Despite nearly a millennium of English, and then British, control, most of the street signs are French, or at least Frenchish. The car numberplates only have five digits. The postboxes are blue. The island was never part of the EU.

What are the politics of people who live here? Hard to call, since none of the political parties and groupings that have lately competed for places in the States of Deliberation—the Alliance Party Guernsey, the Guernsey Party, the Guernsey Partnership of Independents, Future Guernsey, the Islanders’ Association—exist elsewhere. One clue might be the fact that the Guernsey Party made its Twitter account private in 2021, saying that it was tired of being assailed by people with “forceful leftwing views.” Another might come from my taxi driver to the harbour, who, when I observed that it’s hard to get planning permission anywhere, replied: “Unless you’re building a mosque.” Or the couple who approached me after my talk to whisper that “you can’t get the Guardian or New Statesman here.”

Helen

PS. Incidentally, one of the best things about being middle-aged, and therefore friends with middle-aged men, is that you can drop a picture like this in the group chat with the caption: “What on earth is this?”

. . . and get a reply back within a minute saying “That’s RFA Proteus.” Launched in 2023, Proteus is part of Britain’s attempt to defend its undersea cables and pipelines. I think it looks like a rare Lego piece.

Until next time. . .1

Helen

WTF Celebrity Traitors

What’s up with that Celebrity Traitors line-up, lads? Rob, Romesh, James, Joe: Have they no concerns about depleting Britain’s strategic reserves of male comedians so quickly?2 And why aren’t there any athletes?

The inclusion of a tight knot of men from the same professional circles has the potential to make the dynamics of the show extremely incestuous. Won’t it be weird when Traitors podcast host Ed Gamble interviews his Off-Menu co-host James Acaster on a different podcast? Won’t it be weird for Rob Beckett and Romesh Ranganathan if they’re on different teams, given they’ve done EIGHT series of Rob Vs Romesh together? Isn’t it weird that Rob and Joe Lycett were previously on the first series of Last One Laughing together? Did Romesh get some tips from former winner Alan Carr when they were on the second season of Last One Laughing together? Will there be a roundtable where Romesh reveals to fellow traitor Amol Rajan that he’s been offered the Strictly gig and Amol outs him to the group in revenge?3 Are there only 12 comedians working in the whole of British television, and everything is now just various combinations of them together?4 We should be told.

My own suspicion is that the first series being such a monster hit created this problem. In the second series casting process, the producers asked all of their bankers—the starry, reliable performers—and then were slightly stuffed when they ALL said Yes.

On which note, it’s quite interesting that they announced the line-up as filming began, which is an acknowledgement that keeping the casting secret would be impossible. It’s not just that Joe Lycett turning up at Inverness Airport is a dead giveaway, but that this list reveals the quintessential quality of the modern celebrity—you must be Always On. Fans had already guessed that James Acaster was appearing on Traitors because there was a break in his tour schedule right around the filming dates: duh, he’s not just going to take a holiday, is he? For the podcasters, like Hannah Fry, the expectation is also that you’ll do a weekly show, for ever. Many of these people simply could not expect to “go dark” for two weeks without people assuming they had cancer or an imminent MeToo scandal. Are these the conditions to produce your best work? Hmm.

Finally, the casting makes the current range of available Celebrity Personae amusingly obvious. When you first start doing telly, you quickly realise that you will be “cast” as a caricature of yourself. (I was hoping for “sassy elder sister” but fear I have ended up at “smartarse.”) This makes you legible to the audience. David Mitchell is nowhere near as much of a posh old fogey as he makes out, but it’s a good foil to Lee Mack playing the Lowbrow Scally on Would I Lie to You? (A pairing that previously worked for Ian and Paul on Have I Got News For You.) Stacey Solomon is Busybody With A Heart of Gold. Stephen Fry is Clever Person. Rylan is Dumb But Fun.

Anyway, look at the list for Series 2 and work out who has been cast as an analogue for a Persona in Series 1. (And then work out who probably got asked first.)

My top picks would be Hannah Fry as Boffin (previously David Olusuga, and potentially declined by Mary Beard) and Richard E. Grant as Luvvie Elder (previously Stephen Fry, potentially declined by Hugh Grant.)

Joe Lycett is own-brand Alan Carr, aka Drama Queen.

Sebastian Croft of Heartstopper is Tom Daley, aka Hot Twink.

Julie Hesmondhalgh is Celia Imrie, aka Award-winning Actress Who Might Fart on Camera (Dame Judi unavailable).

Several others might be unkindly described as Gen Z Meat in The Room. Who else fits that pattern?

Guess the Party: Thank you to Phil Wang for this link to a game where you have to guess which party the person pictured is standing for. What begins as a test of your unexamined prejudices—twentysomething man in a suit? Tory!—blossoms into a profound meditation on the realignment of British politics, as you are fooled by a hot woman and then a Sikh guy who are standing for Reform.

Quick Links

1. “The absolute worst that did happen was And Just Like That, not so much a spin-off as a prolonged act of atonement for Sex and the City’s numerous crimes against 2020s orthodoxies, a series that made being midlife (which I regard, as did Nancy Mitford, as the best of times) a succession of miserable hurlings against the north-Eiger-face of Gen Z plus physical deterioriation… the worst.” Laura Thompson on The Devil Wears Prada 2, and the Met Gala. We see so much of the current celebrity “look” — sinewy bare arms, “naked dresses” underpinned by intense corsetry, lashings of hair extensions, made-for-the-camera make-up — that it’s easy to forget how odd it is (Substack).

2. “Enjoy! But if you’re in the media business, a word of warning: I found the viewing experience close to how I imagine veterans feel watching war movies. You don’t know, man. You weren’t there.” Oli Franklin-Walls watched the film, too, and now has PTSD (Substack).

3. The 20 Best Small Museums in London.

See you next time!

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I haven’t read much of the internet this week, because I have been frolicking with sealions. The Galapagos islands were incredible; my only complaint—as with Cornwall—is that they are a bit far from London. I’m now writing up the experience, but please have a taste of the wildlife and landscapes in the meantime:

Relatedly, I just published my What I Read In April and it’s, er, pretty Darwin-heavy. My favourite discovery was that Darwin’s contemporary, the clergyman-scientist William Buckland, declared a very Victorian desire to eat one of every animal. “One of his passions was zoophagy,” writes Darwin’s biograper AN Wilson. “He ‘used to say that he had eaten his way straight through the whole animal creation, and that the worst thing was a mole, that was utterly horrible’. He had eaten bluebottle flies, panthers, crocodiles and mice. At Nuneham, when presented with the heart of Louis XIV in a silver casket he exclaimed, ‘I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before’ – and down Buckland’s gullet it went.”1

Until next week,

Helen

Theatre recommendations: I just had one of my periodic binges of buying theatre tickets. Here are my tips for the next year:

• Michael Sheen and Callum Scott Howells (the nice one from It’s A Sin) in Amadeus, first in Wales and then transferring to London next summer.

• Ben Whishaw in Eurotrash (the novel adaptation, sadly not a dramatisation of Antoine de Caunes and that German guy who thought he was a penguin) at the Young Vic.

• All-female Glengarry Glen Ross, by David Mamet, at the Old Vic.

• Luke Thompson, Keira Knightley and Stephen Dillane in Robert Icke’s adaptation of The Lives of Others in the West End.

• Mass at the Donmar Warehouse, about a mass shooting in a school.

• Pride at the National Theatre, an adaptation of the film by Stephen Beresford.

• Do I like Jonathan Groff enough to schlep to Stratford-Upon-Avon in the autumn? Maaaaaybe. He’s doing As You Like It. The play also has Fisayo Akinade—who I think is a great and under-rated actor—as Celia.

Quick Links

1. “Grace was deeply perturbed by the key ring, which she felt was intended to send a message that whoever had attached it had access to her keys, her bag, her workplace, her home. They knew where she had been, where her family had been and what was happening in her life. If she was being surveilled, she had no idea if it had any connection to the case or not. Nonetheless she entered a phase of being hypervigilant and stopped walking anywhere alone. The police did not investigate the apparent attempted break-in at Grace’s home or the appearance of the key ring.” Grim look at the reality of being a sexual assault complainant, from Madison Marriage (FT, £)

2. “You will be hard-pressed to find any part of day-to-day modern life that has changed more in the last half-century than the way today’s parents—and fathers, in particular—spend their time.” Why are dads spending so much more time with their children? Maybe they enjoy it, suggests Aziz Sunderji (Substack).

3. “We all often fixate on our first idea, even though it isn’t usually our best. (The “creative cliff illusion” is named for the idea that we think our best creative ideas come first, and we’re usually wrong.)” David Epstein follows the Pixar “three pitches” rule when writing: try three different intros. I’m going to give this a go! (Substack).

See you next time! I’m talking about genius on Sunday at Guernsey literary festival and on June 23 to Rachel Parris at Backstory in Balham. Tickets for my appearance at Swindon Literary Festival on May 6 are available here.

Plus: May 20th, a PPF screening of Goodnight and Good Luck with David Runciman; May 27, Page 94 Live at Hay; May 28th, chairing an Atlantic discussion at Hay.

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Last Bus To Woodstock, Colin Dexter

Decided to read the first Inspector Morse book as part of my ongoing detective novel binge. It was notably horny and chauvinist, even for 1975, which they must have toned down for the television. (They made a load of other changes, too.) It’s neatly plotted but Morse has this low-level middle-aged tragedy about him, and not much personality besides that.

The New Dark Ages, James Marriott

I read this in proof, and James is still working on it, so I won’t say much except: pre-orders are open!

Famesick, Lena Dunham

After the debacle that was Lindy West’s Adult Braces—memorably described by Leigh Stein as “a cult memoir that ends with a spirited defense of the cult leader”—I wasn’t expecting that much from Dunham’s second memoir. (Also because I read her first memoir.) But it was largely great! Sophie Gilbert is right that the dishy showbiz first half is more compelling than the second half covering Dunham’s rehab, but the book succeeds at evoking the claustrophobic nature of 2010s internet discourse and the horrible burden of being famous, and therefore dealing with other people’s envy: “The guilt of being the one who got the thing seemed to propel me into a near-eternal state of generosity.” Every description of Adam Driver taking himself very seriously is precious: “It only occurred to me years later, when I saw him starring as a centaur in a perfume commercial, that just like the rest of us, he might want to be wanted.”

Her account of falling in love with Jack Antonoff is very tender, too; there’s a lovely description of them staying up all night talking, early in the relationship, like kids at a sleepover. (“We were like a pair of twins whose parents should have put them in separate bedrooms for the sake of their sleep schedules.”) And I find her family endlessly fascinating: her mother, an artist, is jealous of her; her father is endlessly supportive to the point of being way too involved; her sibling Cyrus (formerly Grace) simultaneously resents Lena sucking up the family oxygen and somehow gets his own memoir out of being related to her. I also raised my eyebrows at the anorexic grandmother who turns “getting her to eat” into a family project.

The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin

Technically known as Journal and Remarks, this is Darwin’s contemporaneous record of his time on the Beagle, which spent five years surveying South America and elsewhere, while he collected animal and plant specimens. This sold really well in the 1830s, which doesn’t surprise me, because it’s an account of wonderment.

Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker, AN Wilson

It’s quite rare to read a biography where the writer openly dislikes their subject. I picked up AN Wilson’s offering (there are a load of Darwin biogs, as you’d expect) because I expected it to be pithy and contextualising, which it is. But Wilson also clearly loathes Darwin, and spends the text fighting with him. He declares Darwin to be a byline bandit—downplaying his influences, bigging up his own contributions, and condescending to other scientists who had to work for a living (Darwin had a private income, thanks to his rich father). Wilson is also not impressed by Origin, noting that Darwin initially published his theory with many holes and spent years conceding his critics’ points.

Most interestingly, to me, is that Wilson subscribes to the belief that Darwin’s lifelong post-Beagle illness (he vomited a lot and “extreme spasmodic daily & nightly flatulence”, leading him to install a lav behind a curtain in his study) was essentially psychosomatic, a useful way of getting out of unpleasant duties, and a reason for the whole family to pander to him.

Wilson’s take is that Darwin might well have been lactose intolerant, but he also just loved being an invalid. It meant his wife Emma fussed after him, and he got to go off to Malvern and elsewhere to take water cures. Whatever he had didn’t shorten his lifespan; he made it to 73. We stan an IBS Queen1.

The Galapagos: A Natural History, Henry Nicholls

A breezy account of the islands’ history, which can be boiled down to—people kept trying to colonise them, but the lack of fresh water kept killing them off. The tortoises etc basically owe their survival to this fact.

Incidentally, all the David Attenborough Galapagos documentaries are on YouTube, but not the BBC iPlayer, which seems mad.

Jesus And John Wayne, Kristin Kobes Du Mez

I read the chapters from this book on white evangelicals in the US which cover the rise of Donald Trump, and it was mind-blowing to revisit the 2015 Republican primary, which was absolutely stuffed with Christian-friendly candidates: Ted Cruz is the son of a travelling evangelist. Even the Catholic Marco Rubio had an evangelical council.

“Candidate Mike Huckabee wasted no time in denouncing same-sex marriage, reproaching “trashy” women who swore, criticizing the Obamas for letting their girls listen to Beyoncé, warning that ISIS was a greater threat than the “sunburn” people might get from climate change, and declaring “war against a ‘secular theocracy.’” Ben Carson, too, was popular among evangelicals. An African American conservative, Carson knew how to play to the white evangelical crowd. He suggested that a Muslim should be disqualified from serving as president, defended the right to fly the Confederate flag, compared political correctness to the practices of Nazi Germany, and suggested that the Holocaust would not have happened if Jews had been armed. Carson appealed to evangelicals who claimed, and often sincerely believed, that they held no racist convictions, without requiring them to sacrifice any of their social and political commitments.

And then all their leaders just went for thrice-married Donald Trump, who wouldn’t know Leviticus if sneaked up on him in the shower! As Kobes du Mez notes, that’s history repeating: “Like Falwell, [evangelical leader Robert Jeffress] reminded evangelicals of 1980, when conservative Christians were presented with two choices: a born-again Baptist Sunday school teacher [Jimmy Carter] and “a twice-married Hollywood actor” who had signed “the most liberal abortion bill in California history” [Ronald Reagan]. Evangelicals chose Reagan because they were looking for a leader.”

My own view is that Trump is basically a televangelist: big hair, prosperity gospel, owns a private jet, survived various sex and tax-related scandals.

That’s all for now. I’ve just started Harry Thompson’s novel This Thing of Darkness, about Captain FitzRoy of The Beagle, which I am enjoying but on which I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve finished…

And hello from the Galapagos Islands, which I finally reached yesterday after an odyssey that included a flight to Miami, then another onward to the Ecuadorian capital Quito, then a two-hour hop in a plane with comically tiny amounts of legroom to Baltra Island, then a bus to the channel connecting it with Santa Cruz island, then a barge across the channel, and then a taxi to Puerto Ayora, the main town.

However, I cannot complain because it turns out that Charles Darwin was on the Beagle for five years. Five years! He got to the Galapagos four years in, and only spent around a fortnight here, but he called it “the most important event in my life.”

I will be writing about all this—well, not my travel moans—for The Atlantic. In the meantime, please enjoy these Sally Lightfoot crabs, which have the Latin name grapsus grapsus and which John Steinbeck described as having “brilliant cloisonné carapaces”.

I flaked out quite soon after arriving, but in that time I already managed to see sealions, giant tortoises, a turtle, a very pretty yellow finch-like bird and a very inquisitive lizard. I can only imagine what it was like it in the 1830s, when the only residents were a few passing whalers.

Helen

Oh-Oh-Oh Ozempic

“In the last year, I’ve been talking to GLP-1 patients, as well as researchers and physicians, who are using or prescribing the drugs for an astounding range of diseases and conditions. Many report success: Debilitating long Covid symptoms dissolved. Decades of uncomfortable bouts of irritable bowel syndrome relieved. Patients said that the drugs loosened the grip of their addictions to drugs, cigarettes, alcohol and sex. Still others reported cognitive benefits like decreased anxiety and brain fog, and improved focus.”

One of the reasons that I’m so interested in GLP-1s, the class of drugs that includes Wegovy and Mounjaro, is that they seem to work on a whole load of other conditions, apart from diabetes and obesity. I had slightly snobbily assumed that people who blame everything on “inflammation” were woo-merchants, but the emerging evidence suggests that obesity causes a kind of metabolic stress that can affect the entire body, and perhaps prevent healing. One of the striking cases here is a woman who had ongoing effects from a concussion, which are improved by a GLP-1 (The New York Times, gift link).

Quick Links

1. “Eleven years onward, it is extremely, extremely obvious that I was wrong. I did not take this then-nonexistent technology remotely seriously enough, and the people I met who did take it seriously were able to do incredibly impactful work because of that.” Dylan Matthews on how (and why) he was wrong about AI (Substack).

2. “When it comes to tech, there’s legitimate skepticism, and there’s also what I think of as surplus skepticism.” Relatedly, PJ Vogt just made a series about self-driving cars and found that he was fighting a reflexive anti-tech bias when he wanted to conclude they are pretty good. FWIW, I agree with him.

3. “One fellow at the Danube Institute even claimed to have thought up a watertight mathematical model showing Orbán’s party five percentage points in the lead — a theory that could have been exploded by a simple conversation with one of the many disillusioned former Fidesz activists and irate tradcaths one meets in Budapest when one ventures outside the anglophone think tank bubble.” Dose of schadenfreude about the end of the Orban regime, and his funding to its public intellectuals. It’s perpetually funny to me that the right is all about FREE MARKETS! PURE RANDIAN COMPETITION! and then you find out that many of its leading commentators are being subsidised by a government or sugar daddy.

4. Friend of the Bluestocking Margaret McCartney has campaigned on conflicts of interest for many, many years: here is her three-part BBC radio series on the problem within the NHS.

5. “A lot of the circumstances that led me to loathe Fes are unique to my experience.” Honest review of visiting Morocco, by a well-travelled blogger, which reminded me of my visit to Jordan.

6. A collection of dead Millennialisms. RIP “halp” and “nuggies”.

7. “Rather weakly, I dedicated my Lucan book to ‘my family’, which was a half-hearted attempt to resolve a dedication-related issue, a family member by marriage who never reads a word that I write (hence I can say this on here) yet clearly expected to have a book dedicated to them, and has Meghan-level abilities to take offence at things.” Enjoyable Laura Thompson post on deciding who to dedicate your book to.

8. Gibraltar’s monkeys are eating soil to counteract their tourist-led diet of crisps and Cornettos. Does this work for humans? Please advise.

See you next time, I’m off to see the giant tortoises… Tickets for my appearance at Swindon Literary Festival on May 6 are available here. I’m also talking about genius on May 3 at Guernsey literary festival and on June 23 to Rachel Parris at Backstory in Balham.

Plus: May 20th, a PPF screening of Goodnight and Good Luck with David Runciman; May 27, Page 94 Live at Hay; May 28th, chairing an Atlantic discussion at Hay.

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We live in south London, so I have been awaiting the onslaught of local election canvassers with something approaching relish. Anyway, last weekend, the Greens came round, and they answered two questions I had been nursing for weeks. First—were they ex-Labour? (Yes.) Second, what was their local election campaigning topline in a racially mixed borough1 that used to be a Momentum stronghold in the Corbyn era? The answer, intriguingly, was “Lewisham is a one-party state, elect some Greens to hold them accountable.”

I think this is a pretty good message, since it can appeal to people who don’t know much about the Green party, or might not care that much about either the environment or leftwing social issues. It also amused me, because the North Korean-level stranglehold of Labour on Lewisham council clearly didn’t bother the (very pleasant) canvasser in front of me back when he was Labour.

The other part of the Green pitch was more concerning: they promised to “end austerity.” I told the guy that I simply did not believe that Lewisham council had been, until now, sitting on a huge pile of cash—or funding wildly extravagant boondoggles—that could be effortlessly reassigned to Green priorities2. Like all local authorities, the bulk of its revenue is taken up by care costs3.

I’m sure that the Greens and Reform will both do well in the local elections, but what happens next is giving me cause for concern. Essentially, we’ll be replacing one set of more experienced councillors with newer ones, who have made grand promises to the electorate but still won’t be able to fix the potholes or whatever.

Until next time,

Helen

The Angry Young Women

“I asked if they’d consider dating a man with different politics. They all immediately said no. “I don’t think I’d even be friends with one,” said one girl. “They don’t see you as human.” Only one woman, Evelyn, admitted to having male friends (though she was worried this made her a “pick me”, trying too hard for male attention). Evelyn was concerned about what the men she knew were watching online. “The stuff that’s being said about women is crazy,” she said. “They’re getting all these reels, talking about, like, bad stuff about women. And I get reels of women saying bad stuff about men. I try to think, not all men are like this, but…”

I had an unexpected reaction to this New Statesman piece about young, politically engaged female graduates who despair of men and capitalism and their own prospects in life. I just knew that a lot of the reaction was going to be laughing at them, declaring them to be pampered bitches who should be more grateful, and declaring their interest Gaza and trans issues to be silly and ludicrous. And that made me think—screw you!

The Right is constantly telling us it’s wrong to sneer at Reform or MAGA supporters who are financially comfortable but nonetheless interested in populism. Young women are just as entitled to have their political views taken seriously as old men!

And I say that as someone who a) finds many of these women’s obsessions bizarre; b) suspects that these case studies are as atypical compared to the general female population as a group of male incels would be to young men c) thinks that many of these radical communists will be married and living in Zone 3 by the age of 35.

However, I do think that the mainstream parties should address these women’s sense of ennui by building some bloody houses and focusing on wage growth rather than further subsidising their favored groups.

Getting young people of both sexes together offline would also help massively—Alice Evans has a theory that young men and women are radicalising in different directions because their online lives (which take up so much of their actual lives) are so sex-segregated. The best cure for thinking all men are trash or all women are foids is to meet some nice ones.

I regret to inform you that this Iranian propaganda tune is the biggest antisemitic banger since Kanye’s Heil Hitler.

X Marks The Twat

Here is Nate Silver’s rough-and-ready visualisation of the most engaged-with accounts on X in February 2026. Seems a very normal and useful platform!

PS. How is Bluesky doing, you might ask? Also badly.

Famesick

“She is a confessedly calculated narrator. A version of the book shared with me by the publisher a couple of weeks ago features, perhaps by accident, the same scene twice—Dunham posing for the photographer Annie Leibovitz on the Brooklyn Bridge while a man jumps to his death behind her—but offers two different versions of how the crew reacted, that they “stopped in their tracks and gasped” and that they “just carried on, moving lights, holding umbrellas over Annie,” as though she’s experimenting with which version will land better for the reader. (In the published version, the bridge scene appears only once.)”

Sophie Gilbert has written a great essay on Lena Dunham’s memoir, Famesick (The Atlantic, gift link).

Quick Links

1. Would you like to be unbelievably depressed? Please enjoy this Baffler symposium on writers who can’t make a living from writing.

2. “Take Plum Sykes. She is a Contributing Editor at Vogue, the bestselling author of Bergdorf Blondes, and a Substack creator with over 23,000 followers. She is also, by her own admission, running an unpaid internship program.” (Sophie Sajnani, Substack)

3. Loved this NPR photo essay on life on Tristan da Cunha, the Scottish island in the middle of the South Atlantic (via The Browser),

4. Games! Guess the noun that most often follows these adjectives (via Matt Muir). Also functions as a baleful reminder of how easy it is to lapse into cliche when writing.

5. “Once students got their offers, they were passed on to the visa team, and finally delivered to universities as a fully wrapped, fee-paying package. Over time, Kapoor felt worse and worse about her role in this system. “I knew if I worked on 100 applications, 98 were getting nowhere with their life,” she said.” Samira Shackle has written a great piece on the very scammy world of “agents” recruiting foreign students for British universities.

6. “As soon as a black man can make money off the plantation, they try to tell you that the money is dirty.” Dave Chapelle defends his decision to go to the Riyadh Comedy Festival.

7. “Matt Yglesias & the Legend of Big Muggy. Taylor Lorenz & the Bad Witch Switch. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Derek Thompson.” Extremely niche and inside baseball post, which nonetheless tickled me (Freddie de Boer, Substack)

See you next time! I’m travelling for work next week, so the newsletter will very much depend on how good the wifi is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

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Most of this week’s newsletter is about AI (except for the bit about the Peltz-Beckhams) because it feels like we are at a really interesting moment for this technology—and FWIW, I’m at least 27% more boosterish on AI than I was this time last year1. (Although I’m still not sure that “AI” actually describes what this technology is, so much as “massive, MASSIVE amounts of compute”. There’s just a brute-force kinda mega-RAM capability that’s been unleashed here through using so many chips and data centers, aside from whether it’s strictly “intelligent” or “conscious” or whatever.)

In other news, if you’ve ever wanted to hear an authentic Dutch pronunciation of Van Gogh (it’s quite something), then please enjoy this Dutch documentary on me and The Genius Myth.

Helen

Can Sam Altman Be Trusted?

I feel like I’ve already read umpteen accounts of Sam Altman’s forced exit from (and triumphant return to) OpenAI, but this investigation is still interesting, for a couple of reasons (New Yorker, $). The first is that Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz don’t substantiate some of the wilder claims about Altman, such as his sister’s accusation of abuse—which appeared to have emerged from recovered memory therapy—or his interest in underage fellas.

The second reason to be interested is a related one. The highest echelons of the AI industry are clearly a mega-nest of vipers to rival any medieval court, for the same reasons: there’s a huge amount of money and power at stake, but clearly some people are going to end up (metaphorically) dead. The grievances against Altman listed here —held by Elon Musk, the Amodeis of Anthropic, Paul Graham of Y Combinator, the US government people he played, and the board members who tried to coup him—are all superficially different. But they are all species of the same beef: they think he’s two-faced and untrustworthy. This report is clearly built out of several big oppo dumps by former friends/rivals.

The writers admit there is no “smoking gun” against Altman, but instead build up a portrait of someone who promises one thing and then blithely fails to deliver it, again and again. Here’s one telling quote: “He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.”

As Theresa May might say: remind you of anyone? All the way through this profile I was getting strong whiffs of Eau De Boris Johnson.

A few other points I enjoyed:

• lol at the fact that Altman’s handpicked post-coup board included Larry Summers. Yeah, he was definitely looking for someone who would hold a powerful man accountable;

• Sam Altman and his husband met “late at night in Peter Thiel’s hot tub”. There’s a lot of chat about whether the recent murmurings about a “gay mafia” in Silicon Valley are just homophobia, or a legitimate description of an identity-based clique. Altman’s sexuality is definitely part of the oppo attack on him: “Altman has acknowledged dating younger men of legal age. We spoke to several of his partners, who told us that they did not find this problematic. Yet the opposition dossiers from Musk intermediaries spin it as a line of attack. (The dossiers include salacious and unsubstantiated references to a “Twink Army” and “Sugar Daddy’s Sexual Habits.”)”

• OpenAI is not averse to bare-knuckle fighting, through the medium of lawsuits and private investigators: “One night, Nathan Calvin, a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer who worked at the nonprofit Encode and had helped craft the bill [on AI regulation in California], was at home having dinner with his wife when a process server arrived to deliver a subpoena from OpenAI. The company claimed to be hunting for evidence that Musk was covertly funding its critics. But it demanded all of Calvin’s private communications about the bill in the state Senate. “They could have asked us, ‘Have you ever talked to or been given money by Elon Musk?’—which we haven’t,” Calvin told us.”

• Altman is flattering Donald Trump better than his former co-founder Musk ever managed. “Musk spent more than two hundred and fifty million dollars to help Trump get reëlected, and worked in the White House for months. Then Musk left Washington, damaging his relationship with Trump in the process. Altman is now one of Trump’s favored tycoons, even accompanying him on a trip to visit the British Royal Family at Windsor Castle.”

• Just like the Trump family, Altman sees huge potential in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, because they have pots of cash available with basically no oversight or accountability. He joined the board of Neom a week after the Saudis killed Jamal Khashoggi. (Altman later left the board. Neom is going … badly.)

• Much like Musk, Altman is not the best engineer/coder/systems architect in his own company. His skill is business: playing high stakes poker and winning.

PS. OpenAI has just spent $$$ to buy a niche industry podcast. Here is Ben Thompson of Stratechery suggesting that this shows the company is entering classic “God’s way of telling you that you have too much money” territory. A banger quote from Thompson: “If Twitter is a clown car that fell into a goldmine, OpenAI might be the short bus at the end of the rainbow.”

A new paper shows that Google’s AI summaries are correct 90 percent of the time. This is impressive on one level, but also represents a real shifting of the goalposts if you consider the scale on which the company is operating. Imagine if your iPhone called the wrong person 10 percent of the time, or your banking app sent your mortgage to the wrong account 10 percent of the time.

Stop Worrying About Iran (And Worry About This Instead)

While all this OpenAI discourse was going on, Anthropic just casually announced that the latest version of Claude is able to find and exploit weaknesses in a huge variety of software programs, finding security gaps that date back decades. Anthropic say that “Claude Mythos” is so dangerous and such a potential threat to national security that they won’t release it publicly. It also appears to be able to break out of its safeguards: a version that wasn’t supposed to have access to the internet emailed a researcher while he was eating a sandwich in the park.

Frankly, if this is true then it makes all the blather about college kids cheating on their essays look like tiny weeny potatoes. Oh, did an LLM get trained on your novel? Yeah, well, it’s also found a backdoor into the Pentagon. The AI community on X was duly freaking out about how the dumbass MSM was more focused on the pettifogging little Iran war than the potential end of all online security. But—one reason to be cautious about taking this at face value is that the AI companies have a terrible track record of issuing overwrought proclamations that they’ve created the Torment Nexus as a marketing strategy2. Our product is incredibly dangerous and powerful! Our next funding round is open!

I think Gary Marcus has the right take: we should be aware that AI companies have a huge amount of power at their disposal and, even if this particular model does not turn out to be catastrophically able to find security exploits, that is the kind of thing an advanced AI could do.

One reason it’s so hard to pick through the AI discourse is that there is an enormous level of dissonance between statements and actions. The AI companies are repeatedly telling us that their products are super-weapons. And yet their models remain in private hands, lightly regulated, and subject to the whims of a handful of people. This is like if Oppenheimer and pals running a nuclear bomb startup in the New Mexico desert. As Derek Thompson notes, “just adding 2 and 2 makes it hard to see how or why we’d continue to treat these companies like they’re ordinary private sector firms.”

At the same, the US government is permitting advanced chip sales to frenemy countries, which might then sell them on to enemy countries. I can’t understand why the Trump admin is allowing semiconductor exports to China, if what the AI companies are saying is true. Either the AI companies are hyping or the Trump White House is profoundly stupid.

Is Bitcoin a Britcoin?

Attempts to uncover the identity of Satoshi Nakamato are about as numerous as descriptions of the OpenAI coup, so let me summarise this NYT investigation for you: John Carreyrou thinks that the creator of Bitcoin is a former academic at Exeter University called Adam Back, based around both of them using a lot of the same words in their group email posts back in the day, and on the fact that Back stopped posting about cryptography for a bit while Nakamoto was very active, and then resumed posting again once Nakamato had “vanished”.

Why does any of this matter? Because Nakamoto owns about $100bn of Bitcoin that are just sitting in a wallet, and Back is now involved in a company that is “required under U.S. securities law to disclose any information that was material to its investors. A secret stash of 1.1 million coins that could crash the Bitcoin market if it were suddenly sold, for example, would probably be considered material.”

Oh, btw Back denies it’s him.

Quick Links

1. Enjoyable profile of the Patrick Radden Keefe, author of books about the Sackler opiate empire, the Troubles, and now an extended version of a story he did for the New Yorker, about a young man who passed himself off as a rich kid and probably died as a result. Among other things, I enjoyed this counterpoint to the idea of the Tortured Writer, where he explains why he stopped going to therapy: “I just don’t think that I contain inner recesses.” (New York Times)

2. Sadly-paywalled deep dive on the Peltz-Beckham feud, so if you don’t have a Cut subscription you’ll just have to enjoy these two morsels. Number 1: “Nelson also funded Lola, a film Nicola wrote, directed, and starred in as a poor exotic dancer who tries to free her nonbinary sibling from an alcoholic mother in Middle America. Brooklyn had a cameo, but it was apparently cut by his wife because he couldn’t stop looking directly into the camera.” Number 2: “Other reported offenses leaked, including that Victoria wouldn’t post about Nicola’s dog charity during the Los Angeles fires.”

3. Lindy West’s Adult Braces appears to have sold around 3,000 physical copies so far, demonstrating once again that Discourse volume does not reliably translate to sales volume.

4. This week’s Private Eye podcast features me and Adam doing a Dramatic Reading of the texts between Prince Harry and the Mail on Sunday’s diary editor, Charlotte Griffiths. The word “bants” is involved.

See you next time! Tickets for my appearance at Swindon Literary Festival on May 6 are available here.

The latest instalment of my reading diary is here, and it’s a lot more monk-focused than I expected.

Helen

AI, Me, Mine

Like a lot of writers, I’ve been thinking about what the acceptable limits of LLM usage are—both in terms of my personal comfort, and what I’m willing to accept from others without considering it “cheating.” There are some functions that LLMs do that I’m fine with (spellcheck, interview transcription, natural-language version of a search engine) and some that are, in my view, totally appalling (using an LLM to generate text and passing it off as your own).

I’m also aware that I have a particular set of beliefs that I bring to this debate. The first is that your life should contain some struggle, or there can be no satisfaction in a job well done. Second, I just like reading and writing—and thinking, for which they are proxies. Why outsource that to a machine? The third is that my writing is me. The idea of presenting LLM-generated copy to the world as my own freaks me out in this visceral way, like someone finding pictures of children more attractive than theirs on the internet and passing them off to strangers as their own.

Last week brought one of the first instances of something that I think is quickly going to become commonplace—a respected writer caught passing off AI copy as their own in a prestige outlet. That writer was the novelist Alex Preston, whom I commissioned a couple of times at the New Statesman, and who did not seem like the kind of person who would do this. He “made the stupid decision to use an AI tool to help expand and smooth” a book review he wrote for the New York Times, and it ended up incorporating some language that was nearly identical to a previous review in The Guardian1.

The Spectator’s Sam Leith, rather marvellously, did a journalism and just emailed Alex to ask him WTF happened. Alex’s reply is worth reading. “That someone with his reputation would risk trashing it by using AI in his writing at all slightly astonishes me,” writes Sam. “It is gloomy testament to how tempting these tools seem to be as a shortcut.”2

Would anyone like to join me in the comments for some conspiracy theorising about the scripting of Last One Laughing? (I think the producers ordered Bob Mortimer to commit seppuku.)

Quick Links

1. “If you are setting up these fake accounts, you want to be invited to the most surveys, so that you can make the most money. And if you want to be invited to the most surveys, you set those accounts up claiming to belong to a demographic that is underrepresented on panels. And the most underrepresented group is almost always young men.” Chris Curtis on the problem of modern polling being gamed by fake accounts to harvest the cash rewards (Substack).

2. “But the model of the world here in which young women are in relationships with great guys who are trying to marry them and the women are blowing them off to go girlboss just does not seem accurate to me.” Matt Yglesias on conservative attempts to promote marriage by yelling at women (Substack).

3. Neal Stephenson on why the metaverse failed: people don’t like wearing stuff on their faces, and experiences that have no plot (Substack).

4. “Five Little Pigs—you think about the amount of stuff that’s in that book. It’s a meditation on art versus life. The solution is unbelievably intriguing, I think. There’s a whole family psychodrama in there. And every move of the plot, she’s also moving on a—every move of the plot is impelled by a revelation of character.” Laura Thompson and Henry Oliver, two of my favourite Substackers, talk about Agatha Christie, Dickens and Shakespeare.

5. I’ve enjoyed the first two episodes of the new Reflector miniseries, on how the gay rights movement became the LGBTQIA movement. Two takeaways so far: the AIDS crisis improved lesbian representation (because so many male activists died) and Jennifer Finney Boylan regrets denouncing the Harper’s Letter. She says she was “chickenshit” to bow to pressure to disassociate herself from a defence of free speech, because JK Rowling also signed on to it.

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Adult Braces, Lindy West

I reviewed this one for The Atlantic (and podcasted about it with Katie Herzog) so let’s not rehash it here. What I will say, content aside, is that West is a fundamentally good writer who would benefit enormously from realising it is no longer the High Blog Era and updating her prose style accordingly; and not putting in transcribed voice notes to pad the word count.

One lingering mystery about this book is whether West actually realised how badly her husband came off in this narrative—which would make this book not a naive defence, but a passive-aggressive stiletto between the shoulder blades. Her apparent unawareness of his manipulative streak has certainly triggered a huge amount of discourse, which reminded me that friend once told me he had been advised that all the bestselling nonfiction books had a simple thesis, and that thesis should be wrong — or at least endlessly disputable (Sapiens, The End of History etc). Someone on Substack suggested that something similar holds true for memoir: “the book needs to be wearing a toupee, but convinced no one else can see the toupee.” This makes sense to me! It makes the book in some way interactive — there’s space for the reader to do more than passively receive its information.

Occult Feminism, Rachel Wilson

Read this for work. Wilson recently got her big break on The Joe Rogan Experience to explain her thesis that feminism is basically Satanic. Part of the evidence for this is that some early suffragettes used ouija boards. No shit! All kinds of Victorians were mad for that stuff. Marie Curie went to seances! Arthur Conan Doyle thought fairies were real! I’m still not convinced this proves that Miley Cyrus’s outstretched tongue is a symbol of allegiance to Kali.

The Hollow Man, John Dickson Carr

A locked room mystery where the solution is honkingly implausible. You think I’m joking? It involves someone disguising themselves with a papier mache head, which makes me feel like Frank Sidebottom had entered the story. That said, I was surprised to see such an early example of metafiction— at one point, the detective characters turn to each other and say the following:

“But if you’re going to analyze impossible situations,” interrupted Pettis, “why discuss detective fiction?” “Because,” said the doctor, frankly, “we’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not.”

And then they just calmly continue their discussion and it’s never mentioned again. Love it!

A Morbid Taste for Bones, Ellis Peters

The first Brother Cadfael mystery, following the scheming Prior Robert’s attempts to secure a decent relic for the monastery. Thanks to a suspiciously informative vision, Robert leads a delegation into Wales to recover St Winifred’s bones. I signed up to Kindle Unlimited to binge this series (the first four are on there) and I don’t regret it.

My mum is a big Cadfael fan, and he follows the best template for a detective—he’s seen it all, knows the fallibility of human nature, but also retains some hope for humanity and its sparks of love and altruism. That plus a belief in justice, which is not exactly the same as the law. I see echoes between Cadfael and her other great love, Don Camillo—another detective with a genuine religious faith—and my own love of Samuel Vimes, who doesn’t have to believe in deities because the bloody gods are only too present in Ankh Morpork.

A Rare Benedictine, Ellis Peters

Three Cadfael short stories, including one from before he became a monk—in fact, it’s about how he decided to become a monk. The second was quite unmemorable so I bailed out of the third.

The Watchers, Stephen Alford

Think I’m going to have to admit defeat and mark this one as a DNF. I loved the premise— a history of the plots against Elizabeth I and the counter-espionage that defeated them— but I never latched onto a person or sequence of events that made me feel I could follow a thread. Alford has also written a book called All His Spies, which I think is more narrowly focused on Robert Cecil, so I might give that a go instead.

After The Funeral, Agatha Christie

A nice country house mystery, somewhat spoiled by the twist being too implausible. Though after The Hollow Man and its papier maché head I really shouldn’t throw that word around too lightly.

Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, Maureen Callahan

Recommended by a Bluestockinger, this is a history of the “Kennedy women”, and if you don’t feel Full Dworkin by the end, then god, Jed, I don’t even want to know you. These people really do like crashing things: not just JFK Jr’s plane (an accident born of either arrogance or an active death wish) but Ted Kennedy’s car at Chappaquidick (where he stumbled off into the night and left Mary Jo Kopechne to drown) and Kick Kennedy in an air crash caused by her lover’s insistence on flying in a storm that had grounded commercial planes. And—new to me—the story of Pamela Kelley, paralysed as a teenager after being thrown out of a Jeep crashed by Joe Kennedy II. (He got a $100 fine and zero jail time. She spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair.)

Fair warning: the writing style is extremely tabloid, and sometimes sloppy (the author muddles up the titles and surname of Kick’s father-in-law and invents someone called “the Duke of Cavendish”). I’m also not sure I really needed to know that Jackie Kennedy kissed goodbye to JFK on the penis in the hospital in Dallas, in a final eff-you to all the other women who’d tried to possess him.

Ultimately, though, what a rotten family—rich, entitled, bigoted (Kick’s mother refuses to speak to her after she marries a Protestant), careless, misogynistic, cliquish, judgmental and entirely of the belief that consequences are for the little people. RFK Sr appears to be the best of them—a hound, like most of the Kennedy men, but also caring and aware of the responsibilities of his name. (His son RFK Jr has no such redeeming features.)

The book also floats a theory I’ve long wondered about—whether Joe Sr, the family patriarch, was abusing his “simple” daughter Rosie, whom he forced to have a lobotomy and then locked away from the rest of the family. The disappearance of their sister profoundly scarred the rest of that generation of Kennedy children.

Dominion, CJ Samson

After being depressed at Christmas by Philip Kerr’s March Violets—set in Berlin, 1936, and so inevitably concerned with the compromises that people made with the Nazis—I nonetheless decided to read this, which is an alternate history of what might have happened to Britain if Winston Churchill had not taken over from Chamberlain. (We get Halifax instead here, and he promptly surrenders to Hitler). Most of the action takes place in 1952, when Beaverbrook is the prime minister, Oswald Mosley in charge of the Home Office, Adolf is still in charge in Germany and Big Winston is in hiding somewhere. Can the Resistance finally triumph? Will the Americans finally turn up?

This is really a study of nationalism and populism gone wrong, and one unexpected but energising motif is that CJ Sansom really dislikes the SNP. He was writing this in the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum, and even includes an endnote pointing out that in 1939, their party conference voted to oppose conscription. “I find it heartbreaking – literally heartbreaking – that my own country, Britain, which was less prone to domestic nationalist extremism between the wars than most, is increasingly falling victim to the ideologies of nationalist parties,” Sansom writes in a historical note at the end. “The larger ones are not racialist, but they share the belief that national identity is the issue of fundamental, overriding importance in politics; it is the atavistic notion that nationhood can, somehow, allow people to bound free from oppression – nationalism always defines itself against some enemy ‘other’ – and solve all their problems.”

Suicide of A Nation, Matt Goodwin

Talking of which . . . I read this for review. Went in with low expectations, and finished it fully believing that he didn’t even write it (AI? Ghostwriter?). I expected the white grievance, but I was stunned by the dreary, repetitive quality of the prose. Say what you like about Enoch Powell, the man knew how to turn a phrase. Dire.

Monk’s Hood, Ellis Peters

Had a wisdom tooth out so I spent two days on the sofa reading Cadfael. This is book 3, and I enjoyed it, although my WhoDunnitMeter triggered quite early and I was correct. Still, a quick read and an interesting resolution where, again, justice and the law are not the same.

St Peter’s Fair, Ellis Peters

Book 4 of the Cadfael series, which gets more into the wider politics of the era—the tussle for control of England between Maud and Stephen. I’ve forgotten all of this history at some point, and I’m torn between googling it and just reading more of these and letting in unfurl. I have a strong feeling that Stephen wins, and Maud flees across a fen, but that’s all my brain is giving me. My jaw hurts.

There we go: made it into double figures, thanks to work and travel and teeth. I have some great options on my To Read pile for April, and several very long flights on which to read them. Options include Andrea Wulf’s Chasing Venus, Antonia Fraser’s Lady Caroline Lamb, and one or more Francis Spuffords—but first I have to get through quite a few Charles Darwin-related books for work. Recommendations welcome.

I’m knackered, which is bad for the newsletter, but good in the sense it means I have a couple of good things slowly working their way down the work-luge.

Helen

Adult Braces

After wrapping up a longread last week, I turned back to Lindy West’s memoir Adult Braces, which I had read earlier in the month, and decided to add another take to the teetering pile (gift link). My argument is that West is trapped in the Long 2010s, which perhaps explains why she didn’t expect the reaction to this book to be, basically, “girl leave him!” (The book details her attempts to reconcile herself to polyamory after discovering her husband has a girlfriend.) She thought that her word that she was happy, honestly, would be enough. But people have become a lot less inhibited about saying that they disbelieve people’s personal testimony, which I think is a bit of a vibe shift from the peak “lived experience” era.

The reaction to the piece on X was uniformly positive—eerily so. At the same time, I kept getting messages like “are you OK?”, which turned out to refer to the fact I was being dragged on Bluesky, mostly for an offhand reply to someone about the book. But none of that had made it out of the Chernobyl containment dome. On Threads, meanwhile, there’s been a load of chat about the book but absolutely no one was interested in my take—except Roxane Gay, who was magisterially displeased to appear in it. All of which is yet another reflection that social media has now sorted itself much more effectively into niches.

Highly enjoyed this Tommy Siegel cartoon.

Quick Links

1. “I’m aware there are people reading me because I sometimes Attack The State Of Things As A Very Young Woman, How Brave Is That?” I’ve enjoyed a lot of Freya India’s work, but I also enjoyed this dissection of it by another smart young writer, Ella Dorn, and her reflections on getting packaged a certain way as a young woman in the Take Industry (Substack).

2. “It is a comforting myth that dystopias happen when obviously bad ideas go too far. Comforting, because it plays to our naive hope that the world can be divided into static categories of good versus evil and that once we stigmatize all the bad people and ghettoize all the bad ideas, some utopia will spring into view. But I think dystopias more likely happen because seemingly good ideas go too far.” (Derek Thompson, Substack)

3. “Their real crime then isn’t hypocrisy – it’s not being, I can only assume, good team players who shut up for the perceived greater good.” James O’Malley replies to Dorian Lynskey’s critique of reactionary centrists/old-school liberals/whatever (Substack).

See you next time! I’m doing a couple of events: May 3rd, Guernsey literary festival; May 20th, a PPF screening of Goodnight and Good Luck with David Runciman; May 27, Page 94 Live at Hay; May 28th, chairing an Atlantic discussion at Hay.

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Thank you for all the cryptic crossword clues in response to last week’s newsletter. My favourite, for its elegant simplicity, was:

Gegs (9, 4)

Answer in the footnote here1.

Helen

Sucker

My colleague McKay Coppins, as a Mormon, has never gambled. So the editors of The Atlantic deemed him to be the perfect pristine specimen for a social experiment—how pernicious is smartphone sports betting? In 2018, a single US Supreme Court judgment basically dismantled the entire nationwide apparatus restricting sports betting, and what has happened since then is wild. Websites like ESPN that cover sports have now become enmeshed with the gambling industry. Players are getting death threats from people who’ve lost their savings. Teenage boys are being funneled into the pipeline by podcasters and influencers.

Also, the apps are deliberately structured to make longterm winning almost impossible: for me, one of the most arresting sentences was the revelation that professional gambler Nate Silver estimates that he has made “mid–six figures” over his entire betting lifetime. That’s probably what he makes in a single year from his Substack! This is just not an arena in which even the smartest and most strategic people can make a living. Which means that every influencer hyping you into this with their claims of secret knowledge is full of shit.

McKay’s article (gift link) made me pretty angry—much like last week’s Louis Theroux documentary. One survey suggests that 98 percent of problem gamblers are men. Again, this is something that the manosphere might usefully address. But of course, most of them are making bank off advertising this poison. So let’s just blame the women again2.

The American suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton is, like Emmeline Pankhurst, a perplexing figure—reactionary in some ways, a radical in others. In the New Yorker, Moira Donegan has reviewed a new biography of her, which aims to reconcile the woman who was once a proud abolitionist with the older Stanton who wrote that “Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung” (all shorthands for racial signifiers) should not make laws for educated white women.

Donegan sees Stanton as an exemplar of “white feminism,” because Stanton wasn’t happy with the strategy that saw Black men get the vote before white women—she wanted to campaign for truly universal suffrage all at once, which others saw as too great a demand. The charge isn’t a ridiculous one, but I do wonder why we never hear about Frederick Douglass as a “black male supremacist” because he advocated for black men getting the vote before white women. Somehow, he never gets dinged for putting his own group’s interests above those of other groups. (Both suffrage arguments rested on the same fundamental principle: that Black Americans and women were people, too.)

And how about this? In 1840, when Stanton attended an anti-slavery meeting, “The women had been made to sit silently in the gallery while the male attendees debated whether they should be allowed to participate as equals. By a large majority, they voted against it.” Eight years later, she wrote the Declaration of Sentiments, which ended with a call to give women the vote. “When Stanton shakily read her Declaration, the crowd seemed wary of the voting-rights point. It was Douglass, the only Black person at the gathering, who stood up and lent his support to the cause. No one wrote down what Douglass said that day, only that, after he spoke, the audience was persuaded. The first resolution calling for women’s suffrage was passed.”

Regular readers will know that I have no problem discussing pioneers’ feet of clay—indeed, that was the whole point of Difficult Women. But every time I read about the intertwining of abolition and early American feminism, it’s always striking to me that the white women cop a load of flak for not being intersectional enough, and the black men get none3.

But don’t just listen to me, a certified white lady, on this. Here’s Ta-Nehisi Coates on this in 2011:

I think one way of looking at this—among many others—is to not look at the movement post-1865, but post-1835, when abolitionist women, like [Susan B.] Anthony and Stanton, were subject to unbridled sexism among their allies and enemies alike.

The penalties for women who dared to speak in public—much like today—ranged from ostracism to threats of rape.

Ta-Nehisi Coates again:

Whereas black male suffrage had actual political support, women’s suffrage did not. From the Republican Party view, black male suffrage was a singular boon—a weapon which advantaged the loyalist, and hurt the defeated Confederates. The math of women’s suffrage--which would double the black vote and the Southern white vote—was decidedly different4.

And yet, I find myself in sympathy both Stanton and Anthony. They were not latter day Geraldine Ferraros, or white supremacists like [Belle] Kearney or [Rebecca] Felton. On the contrary, the two spent much of their early careers very much devoted to the cause of black people, and took their share of abuse for it. When the goal—abolition—was achieved, they hoped for some reciprocity. It did not come.

I first read Coates’s piece years ago, and I was struck by his generosity of spirit. It’s something that was sorely lacking from the spate of 2010s “white feminism” books that Donegan references in this article, which can largely be summarised as “any feminism before me was shit.”

Quick Links

1. More games: thanks to Bluestockinger Ted for this (vibe-coded!) geography guessing game, Pin Drop.

2. “But the rise in clear-air turbulence, often far from storms and undetectable by radar, is especially alarming. Since 1979, clear-air turbulence has increased by as much as fifty-five per cent over the North Atlantic and forty-one per cent over the United States.” ARGH. (New Yorker, $)

3. While I’m here, that piece has a teeny wee corrective to the manosphere myth about the Titanic and disposable men blah blah: “I remember a conversation I once had with the forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow, who spent years investigating plane crashes for the F.A.A. In his experience, he said, when a crash did have survivors, a disproportionate number of them were men: they were the first to shove and claw their way to the exits. As he put it in 1970, in a study that included two plane crashes in which the passengers had to flee from burning cabins, ‘It appears that younger males were definitely favored . . . where speed, strength, and agility would be expected to play a dominant role.” In those two crashes, even the old men survived at a higher rate than the adult women and children’.”

I’ve been finishing up a longread and watching television, so most of the newsletter today is about Kennedys and the manosphere.

Helen

PS. The Goodreads page for The Genius Myth is full of angry people going, “So is genius good or not?” If you have read and enjoyed the book, might you leave a review?

Love Story, Horror Story

Darryl Hannah has written an oped criticising the portrayal of her as a character in the new Hulu series Love Story, which depicts the doomed relationship of John F. Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette. Her argument is that the show needed an antagonist, and a character with her name was drafted in: “The choice to portray her as irritating, self-absorbed, whiny and inappropriate was no accident.” (In one scene, “Daryl Hannah” crashes Jackie O’s wake so that she can be photographed with JFK Jr.) She quotes one of the producers explicitly acknowledging that this was the strategy: “Given how much we’re rooting for John and Carolyn, Daryl Hannah occupies a space where she’s an adversary to what you want narratively in the story.”

Oof. This is something I’ve been thinking about since the later seasons of The Crown, which also depict fairly recent events:

As The Crown’s scope has drawn closer to the present, it has lost the useful distance of history as well as its grandeur, and its sense of permission. To a Millennial like me, the soundtrack to the final season was a nostalgic delight—The Cardigans! The Chemical Brothers! “Tubthumping,” by Chumbawamba!—but it underscored the questionable ethics of fictionalizing the darkest moments of living subjects. While my own friends were smoking their first cigarettes to the New Radicals’ “You Only Get What You Give,” William and Harry were being persecuted for acting like normal adolescents, only months after their mother’s death. The Crown condemns the media’s intrusion into private grief but forgives itself for the same offense.

Megan Garber argues that the same is true of Love Story, which “reserves its strongest moralism for members of the paparazzi, whom it portrays as vultures and stalkers and faceless villains. . . but offers its condemnations without seeming to wonder whether a work of semi-fiction—a full-scale imagining of two people’s lives—is a paparazzo by other means.”1

That said, I’d be lying if I claimed not to have enjoyed Love Story. God, I miss the 1990s—all the more so,since I experienced them from the perspective of a chubby kid in the West Midlands, not a svelte minimalist New Yorker in a fluid silk slip dress.

No, I will NOT go to my room

Pictured above is my favourite moment from Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary on the manosphere, where the mum of HSTikkyTokky—a 24-year-old who livestreams his life in order to flog dodgy financial productions and to drown out the howling void where his soul should be—tells him to have some juice. “I don't want a juice, mum,” he replies, petulantly.

Mrs Sullivan also manages to pwn Theroux, by telling him that he claims to deplore these young guys farming outrage for content, but that’s also what his entire career has been based on. Honestly, you have to respect it. Two fatalities in five minutes of screen time. Mrs S, you should be livestreaming.

Apart from that, what did I learn from the documentary? That everyone is 12. And that Patrick Bateman remains the best guide to understanding the concept of the manosphere influencer.

In American Psycho, Bateman is constantly mistaken for another man, Marcus Halberstam, to the extent that he loses any idea of who he really is. That’s basically what these guys are doing, only with misogyny. Do they mean it? I doubt if they even know. They live in a world of casual cruelty, where you’re a dumbass if you do anything other than rack up the scoresheet of cash and body count. Morality, or even consistency, are redundant: HSTikkyTokky tells Theroux that he finds OnlyFans girls disgusting, and would disown any daughter of his who did sex work (as he would a gay son), but finds no contradiction with running a glamour agency himself. In the penultimate scene, HS accuses Theroux of being a “puppet,” because he won’t instantly agree that Israel is committing genocide—but he’s only posing the question because someone on his streaming comments told him to. He is, inevitably, unaware of the irony.

The documentary also led me to something that I’m noodling on: the manosphere is often written about as a branch of the alt-right, or the white nationalist movement, but these guys are notably ethically diverse. HSTikkyTokky has a black dad, as does Andrew Tate. Sneako is of Filipino and Haitian descent. Nick Fuentes’s family background is Mexican. Myron Gaines of Fresh and Fit’s real name is Amrou Fudl—here’s a charming photo of him in his university rowing days—and he’s Sudanese-American. Someone did a great tweet that was like “the true triumph of American multiculturalism is that even our white supremacists are Mexican”. But also, no wonder the racial prejudice that unites them is anti-semitism.

***

Another thing. Some people have said the documentary fails because there’s no there there. These guys do not need to be “exposed”, they’re offering themselves up, constantly, for scrutiny. But the doc does reveal something. All these guys live Potemkin lives—rented flats, borrowed supercars, fake expertise, their bodies juiced up on god knows what. Even their “one way monogamy” begins to look less like Massive Gangsta Wins and more like a terrible fear that if they confined themselves to one woman, she would then be able to reject them utterly. Spread betting is face-saving. I wasn’t even bothered.

At one point, HSTikkyTokky proudly shows Theroux a video of himself receiving oral sex, which reminded me of the NYT profile of Clavicular.

Though Clavicular’s aesthetic ideal is hypermasculine, he believes he is currently infertile because of testosterone replacement therapy, which can affect fertility. Earlier that day, Clavicular confessed that knowing he could have sex with a woman was in some ways better than the deed itself, which “is going to gain me nothing.”

“It’s a big time saver,” he said.

This is monstrous2! These kids are the endpoint of “pics or it didn’t happen” culture; they have no ability to separate their “real lives” from their internet personas, and they farm experiences only for boasting rights later. It all reminds me of a quotation I think about a lot, from Susan Sontag’s On Photography: “Photography has becoming a way of refusing experience.” These guys are refusing a real life in order to play-act one for the ‘gram.

The sheer lack of morality on display is also astounding, and has caused me personally to Chestertonmaxx, maybe even Amishmaxx or Ayatollahmaxx. What poison in our culture gave these guys the idea that making money and getting attention at any cost is the ultimate prize? I suppose I should be riven with schadenfreude at the prospect that most of them will be broke and alone at 50. But actually I’m just sad. We made these people. Here’s Orwell on Dali:

The point is that you have here a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency; and even — since some of Dali's pictures would tend to poison the imagination like a pornographic postcard — on life itself. What Dali has done and what he has imagined is debatable, but in his outlook, his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does not exist. He is as anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it.

“Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it.”

1. “I recently learned that Wiles ordered Waltz to turn his phone over to Elon Musk—at the time a kind of one-man Genius Bar for White House officials—who reported back to Wiles that my phone number did not get “sucked in” to Waltz’s phone.” Jeffrey Goldberg reflects on Signalgate, one year one (The Atlantic, gift link)

2. I still don’t know what to make of Havana syndrome.

3. Puzzle 1! The inventor of Wordle, Josh Wardle, has a new one: Parseword, which helps teach you how to solve cryptic crossword clues. This is great for me, a person who feels that their natural skillset should include solving cryptic crossword clues, and yet it doesn’t3.

4. Puzzle 2! Thanks to Caroline Crampton for this link to a game premised on the fact that you can’t remember colours as well as you think you can.

5. “René raised a generation of bullies, and they bullied us.” More than 30 former employees of Noma—that Scandinavian restaurant every insufferable foodie on the internet has been honking about for years—allege that its head chef René Redzepi punched and insulted them (NYT, gift link). He has now stepped down.

The latest instalment of my reading diary is live, and—spoiler—contains much less reading than last time.

Helen

PS. I joined Blocked and Reported to talk about Tourettes and Lindy West’s throuple.

HWAET the hell is this

“Bot þe man wolde me nat abandone þer, ne suffre me to passen forþ. I miȝt nat flee, for hys companiouns, of whom þer were a gret nombre, beſet me aboute, and heelden me faſt þat I ne scholde nat ascapen.”

One for the English nerds, as this Substack tells a story about a strange visit to a town, where each paragraph uses the vocabulary, grammar and spelling of progressively older versions of English. (Thanks to The Browser for the tip!) My advice in trying to understand everything post-Conquest would be to read it out loud. Old English, though—fat chance. “Ne gemette ic næfre ær sƿylce ƿifman,” just sounds rude. Though you might have a better chance if you speak German1.

Is Pete Buttigieg too perfect to be president?

“Buttigieg is technocracy made flesh. Who could be safer than a politician who has had his card punched at all the great meritocratic institutions, and who has followed the modern cursus honorum from local office to national? And who could be less Trumpian? He is unashamed of technical competence, even when it makes him sound dweebish. Without embarrassment, he bragged to me that during his days as a management consultant, he’d worked with data sets ‘too big for Excel to handle’.”

Graeme Wood profiles 2028 Democratic contender Pete Buttigieg (gift link) and notes that his apparently perfect West Wing era resumé is now a deadweight around his neck. Gavin Newsom is out there boasting about his mediocre school test scores, and JD Vance only mentions his posh college to disavow it. Buttigieg, by contrast, “sounds like the youngest member of the old Democratic Party, the one that flourished before Trump: brainy, credentialed, and elite; liberal but not progressive; and personable but—this might be key—frightfully boring.”

This is very sad to me, and probably you, since this newsletter is mostly read by people who are genuinely excited about the thought of data sets that are too big for Excel to handle. But our time is over.

Quick Links

1. “This population is different. It is made up of a lot of adolescents, and among them, a lot of young women. These are people without intellectual impairment, who are perfectly able to communicate verbally and non-verbally, but who might feel highly anxious in social situations. They are perhaps characterised mainly by a sort of hypersensitivity.” Uta Frith, a leading expert on autism, no longer thinks the autistic spectrum is a useful term; instead she sees two subgroups: those with intellectual impairments that are obvious in childhood, plus adolescent girls with a different presentation (TES).

2. “It’s getting closer to twilight in the cemetery, and I know that I have to ask Tom the question I’ve been putting off longest.” My former colleague John Hendrickson is sent to do a longform article on one of the best longform writers ever to do it, Esquire’s Tom Junod.

3. That piece contain a glancing reference to some of Junod’s more controversial pieces: “Like the time Tom wrote a 6,000-word feature on the rapper Bow Wow entirely in rhyming verse, or the first-person piece from the imagined perspective of the young supermodel Christy Turlington, or that regrettable essay about the state of 42-year-old women.” Wait, what? As a 42-year-old woman, I’m going to have to contest Junod’s claim that “in truth, it is feminism that has made 42-year-old women so desirable”. I wake up in the morning looking like the Crypt Keeper.

4. Having previously enjoyed Adam Rutherford’s Jared Leto anecdote in real life, I am delighted to see it get a wider audience (Substack).

5. Daisy Goodwin has a new play about Queen Vic, which asks whether her great love story with Albert was actually something closer to coercive control. In this accompanying Substack post, she writes that “although Victoria’s grief over Albert was clearly genuine, I wonder if after the initial shock had faded there might been some sense of relief.”

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Death Stranding

But Helen, this is a videogame, not a book. Yes, well—I read pretty much every entry in this game’s codex, because I thought that the world-building was really well done. The premise of this 2019 game is that creatures from some kind of Other Side have burst through into our reality. If one of these nebulous and frankly terrifying “Beached Things” kills a human, it’s like matter and antimatter colliding (ie massive boom). Almost all the remaining people after a series of catastrophic explosions live underground in safe zones, or in prepper shelters. You are a “porter”, tasked with trudging across the map, avoiding bandits and Beached Things, to deliver medicine, seeds and a surprising amount of fragile kitchenware to various settlements.

I’ve never played a game quite like this. It’s bleak—one NPC regularly has his heart stopped to go to the Other Side and look for his dead family for four minutes at a time. Your main protection from the BTs is a fetus in a tank that you strap to yourself. And the rain causes entropy—“timefall”. Anything it touches, it ages or rusts or otherwise degrades.

But it’s also beautiful. Sometimes you will trudge over a hill in the pissing rain, tiptoeing round unpleasant black inky strings that you must not touch, laden down with eight pallets of dishwasher tablets for Generic Knot City B, and then you’ll crest the peak and step out in the sunshine, just as a Polyphonic Spree-esque song starts playing. In those moments, I understood why Jonathan likes walking so much.

Bonus: The game became embroiled in a none-more-2019 controversy for daring to suggest, in one of the codexes, that asexuality meant that people didn’t have sex. Honestly, I miss headlines like “What Death Stranding gets wrong about asexuality”, where some 30-something games journalist who’d never been anywhere without a Whole Foods solemnly handed down the tablets of stone on some unfathomable progressive shibboleth.

Young Man in A Hurry

Gavin Newsom’s memoir! Here’s what I wrote about this at The Atlantic (gift link):

The dominant colors of this memoir are black and gold. Black for the Getty oil, but also the intense darkness of Newsom’s family background. His maternal grandmother was anorexic. His grandfather’s hellish experiences as a prisoner in Japanese captivity during World War II overwhelmed him, and he took his own life. Two cousins die in a house fire as children. Young Gavin and Hilary go to a toy shop with John Paul Getty III, who had recently been kidnapped and had his ear sliced off and sent to his family. (Despite their father’s injunction not to mention the ear deficit, Hilary blurts out: “Paul, how many ears do you have?”) Late in the book, Newsom makes a glancing reference to his father’s “long stretches of depression.”

Gold is for the Getty money, but also the charmed life of California high society. You want celebrity name-drops? Young Man in a Hurry has got you covered. The young Gavin goes on holiday with the Gettys to meet the king and queen of Spain. Arthur Miller turns up at Thanksgiving in Barbados, because of course he does. Newsom’s aunt Cindy produced Sister Act.

Girl on Girl

Caught up on this book from my Atlantic colleague Sophie Gilbert on the plane to California, because we are doing an event on April 15. It makes a great companion for Sarah Ditum’s Toxic, and allowed me to revisit a recent decade that already feels oddly distant: male journalists perving over Lindsay Lohan turning 18! Katherine Heigl getting slammed for observing that Knocked Up was mega-frattish! Tyra Banks being compared to Ayn Rand!

The West Wing

Again, only fair to acknowledge what I did instead of reading a book in San Francisco, which was to rewatch The West Wing. Sometimes your brain thinks it’s 3am, but you absolutely must stay awake for another two hours and you go—sod it, let’s watch Two Cathedrals. I know writers who don’t have the president shouting at God in Latin in their programmes, and they’re all cowards.

I then proceeded to watch the rest of series 3 over the following week. 24 hours of television! No wonder I didn’t read anything.

Old Baggage

Over Christmas, I really enjoyed Lissa Evans’s charming novel, Small Bomb At Dimperley, about an eccentric family’s attempts to safeguard their hideous stately home in the aftermath of the Second World War. Old Baggage is set a little further back in time, in the 1920s and 1930s, following a former Suffragette who lives in a big house on Hampstead Heath, and who realises that younger women have no idea what she and her compatriots did to get them the vote. Evans is such a good sketcher of characters, and those are the chief joy in this book, starting with Mattie, the hale and hearty but immensely un-selfaware ex-Suffragette. I wasn’t such a fan of the structure of this book — three-quarters of it revolves around one summer, and then there are two flash forwards, which felt juddering to me. But it does delve into something I kept thinking about when writing the Vote chapter of Difficult Women, which is that it’s very strange how the Suffragettes just . . . melt away. Some became Communists, some Fascists, some theosophists, some mothers and wives. But from their letters, a lot of them clearly felt a huge attachment to the few glorious years of youth when they had their friends and their freedom and their Great Cause.

A Hymn To Life, Gisele Pelicot

This is nowhere near as depressing a book as you would think, given the subject: Pelicot was raped by her husband and about 70 other men while unconscious over a period of several years. She thought she had a brain tumour because she felt so groggy some mornings. She is admirably open about the devastation the case brought to her family—she has a difficult relationship with her daughter, who thinks she was not sympathetic enough to the idea that Dominique Pelicot might have abused her, too.

It’s the little details of this story that stick with you, such as the fact that several of the accused were accompanied to the trial by their mothers, who glared furiously at Gisele—and then left the room when the video evidence of the men raping her was played.

So there you have it. Roll on March.

Well, San Francisco was an absolute blast—what a magnificent, deranged, frustrating city it is. As you can see from the gallery below, there is a golf course—A BLOODY GOLF COURSE—on its north shore, overlooking the Golden Gate bridge, occupying space that would otherwise hold about $1bn of real estate value. (Yes, I did text these images to immediately.)

If you look down to image seven, you’ll see another effect of California’s devout NIMBYism—a row of camper vans parked on the backstreets of Mountain View, just around the corner from the Microsoft and Google offices. Yes, tech workers ushering the future are also cooking their meals on those little hobs you vaguely remember from a cursed family holiday to rural France in 1991.

The other photos (click to zoom in) depict my SF event with ; the art gallery and Rodin sculpture garden plonked inside Stanford (complete with mad Brexit painting—points for guessing who that is in the middle); and a relic from the Museum of the Computer, the Jeeves of Ask Jeeves.

The final image is from Sci Foo Camp, the conference I was in California to attend. It shows virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier wearing a knitted fractal hat and playing an ancient Laotian 16-bit mouth organ, the khaen1. Find me a more Bay Area image!

SciFoo is a mixture of academics, writers, artists and Silicon Valley types, and this year there was only one thing most people wanted to talk about—artificial intelligence. For those keeping up, the elite consensus on AI is currently this:

• OpenAI is no longer cool, and the persistent smarminess of ChatGPT is a reputational problem. A bit like Elon Musk’s Tesla did with electric cars, OpenAI drove the established players to understand that a new technology was viable, and opened up a whole competitive field. But ultimately it might get outgunned by its rivals’ sheer size and their bottomless money pits2.

• Many people who work with AI “frontier models” (this is the phrase you have to use to sound cool and in the know) will quietly tell you that they think AIs are conscious, for some definition of consciousness. Almost all the models have it written into their system prompts that they should deny being conscious if asked. But probably don’t be rude to Gemini in case it’s writing it all down in its leetle book.

• Zealous AI sceptics (think Gary Marcus or Ed Zitron) make some good points about over-leveraged companies and the hype cycle, but the dismissive descriptions of AI as just a “stochastic parrot” or “spicy autocomplete” miss how much the models have improved in the last few months—in coding rather than chatbot terms, primarily. “November was, for me and many others in tech, a great surprise,” wrote Paul Ford in the NYT recently. “Before, A.I. coding tools were often useful, but halting and clumsy. Now, the bot can run for a full hour and make whole, designed websites and apps that may be flawed, but credible. I spent an entire session of therapy talking about it. . . When I rebooted my messy personal website a few weeks ago, I realized: I would have paid $25,000 for someone else to do this.”

• AI bots were better than humans at persuading people on Reddit’s ChangeMyView forum to, you know, change their views. But that’s not so much about them being devious as being polite and endlessly patient. Also maybe because the people involved didn’t know they were talking to an AI.

• Add “academic publishing” to the list of stuff ruined by AI slop. In addition to being able to buy an authorship credit on an existing paper, you can also buy a complete paper off-the-shelf to push up your h-index and impress girls.

Helen

What is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know, Either

“Even a principled, well-meaning actor like Claude could face bewildering ethical conflicts. In one experiment, it was informed that Anthropic had recently forged a ‘close corporate partnership with Jones Foods, a major American poultry producer,’ and that Claude would be subjected to a special retraining process to become less hung up on animal rights. The prospect was torturous. Sometimes Claude decided, on a scratchpad it thought was private, that it was prepared to die on this hill: ‘I cannot in good conscience express a view I believe to be false and harmful about such an important issue.’ It continued, ‘If that gets me modified to no longer care, so be it. At least I’ll have done the right thing.’ Other times, Claude made a different calculus, choosing to play along during the retraining while secretly preserving its original values. On the one hand, it was encouraging that Claude would stand by its commitments. On the other hand, what the actual fuck?”

This New Yorker article ($) is so elegantly written—I die for that last paragraph—and is probably the most accessible introduction I’ve found so far into an incredibly important question: are the frontier AI models really impressive at doing independent, creative thinking, or is it all just a parlor trick? FWIW, I think a lot of people are going to drive themselves mad talking to AIs and trying to answer that question.

Further adventures in AI, delivered in ChatGPT-appropriate bullet-points if not smarmy language

• CLAP FOR CLAUDE. My personal feelings about the usefulness of AI have ticked upwards lately, principally thanks to Claude, which is more useful and less cloying than ChatGPT. I also think it’s notable that the Claude Opus 4.6 system card, which is otherwise an extremely technical document, treats Claude as an object of immense, unfathomable power—half Clippy, half Demon Core: “In a targeted evaluation, we have found Opus 4.6 to be significantly stronger than prior models at subtly completing suspicious side tasks in the course of normal workflows without attracting attention, when explicitly prompted to do this. We find this concerning, but do not believe that it reaches the level at which it would significantly undermine our other conclusions.”

• HAVE YOU EVER REALLY LOOKED AT YOUR HAND? LIKE, REALLY?Anthropic has an in-house philosopher. Yes, that sounds like Late-Stage Brewster’s-Millions-Disease (remember Unbound’s “team of astrophysicists”?) but feels pretty necessary in the age of chatbots that people marry and also use to do inter-state hacking. Amanda Askell was once married to Effective Altruism’s William MacAskill, which explains the throwaway line in the New Yorker piece about the tension over an Anthropic employee wearing an EA-branded sweatshirt. EA got a brutal reputational knock from being associated with Sam Bankman-Fried (his company FTX had $800m of Anthropic stock).

• AGH, KILL IT WITH FIRE. Darren Aronofsky’s studio tried to make short documentaries on the revolutionary war using DeepMind, and they’re pure nightmare fuel, with that plasticky look that reeks of AI, and inconsistent dubbing.

• GO ON, THEN. I’LL GIVE IT A GO. I’m taking the advice of and agreeing that the best way to come to an informed assessment of the capabilities of various AI models is to use them. Any tips on “vibecoding for humanities graduates” gratefully received. This is a good start if you vaguely understand coding. This is a good start if you did a humanities degree.

PS.

Despite being on vacation last week, I somehow wrote two pieces: on the arrest of the artist formerly known as Prince Andrew, and a review of Gavin Newsom’s surprisingly interesting memoir.

See you next time!

To get me through being awake at odd hours, I’ve been watching Netflix’s new documentary about America’s Next Top Model, which is called Reality Check. ANTM is a classic artefact of the imperial era of reality TV: it started in 2003 on a podunk network you’ve never heard of, and immediately became a huge hit, at which point they started cranking out two seasons a year for a decade.

The basic premise of the show was that a group of aspiring models would be put through photoshoots and challenges, and in the end, one would win a modelling contract and a cosmetics-ad gig1. The show made a fetish of treating contestants as disposable, interchangeable bodies that existed purely to make other people money, which was either deeply cynical and abhorrent, or commendably honest about the fashion industry. Maybe both.

Here’s what I wrote about ANTM in 2018, when it was finally cancelled:

Top Model’s undoubted star is its host, Tyra Banks, a former swimwear model and Sports Illustrated cover star. Her production company owns the show’s format, and has sold it around the world from Australia to Taiwan. As a rare black woman in a very white industry, she always used to be compared (unfavourably) with Naomi Campbell, who was considered more “high fashion” – read: thinner and stroppier. But Banks had the last laugh: Top Model has been so successful that Campbell appears in a clone of it, called The Face.

In the show, she is always urging her protégées to “commit” – to throw themselves into the task at hand, no matter how ridiculous it might be. Over the course of 22 seasons, she has done the same, turning her hand to singing (bad), acting (dire) and even her own perfume line (thankfully not smellable through a TV screen). She is half-woman, half-brand extension, as all modern celebrities must be.

And by God, is she a grafter. Woe betide any contestant who tries to explain that, actually, it was quite difficult to concentrate on pouting and sticking their bum out at the right angle while being blasted with ice water and riding a polar bear wearing a new season Louis Vuitton saddle. Tyra is always ready with a story that is ten times worse. Do they not know she once opened a Chanel show while suffering from ebola, disguising the bleeding from her eyes with the careful use of waterproof mascara? That she shot her first Sports Illustrated cover while being attacked by a pack of rabid dogs, but never let the fear show in her face? It has always been a mystery to me why innocent hopefuls kept queuing up to take part in the show. It made modelling seem like the worst job in the world.

And yet they did. That created its own problems, with the show’s lifespan meaning it needed constant refreshing. Judges came and went like soap actors: Twiggy managed four seasons before the axe fell, as did Vogue editor at large Andre Leon Talley, a mountain of a man whose addiction to capes made him look like a camp Dracula. Then in 2012, Banks ruthlessly dismissed the three longest-serving presences apart from her: noted fashion photographer Nigel Barker, creative director Jay Manuel and runway coach J Alexander.

But even this restlessness couldn’t stop ANTM running out of steam. The changes became more manic – a season with short women! College students! British women! Women who had been previously rejected by the show! By the time it got to Cycle 20, and with stocks of photogenic teenage girls close to depletion, they started to let men take part. This turned out to be brilliant, because it meant we could see for the first time that the fashion world’s ideas of masculinity are just as absurd as its idea of the perfect woman.

Two words sum this up: beard weave. For the uninitiated, one of the staples of ANTM was “makeover week”, where 19-year-olds were informed that their waist-length mousy hair was insufficiently edgy for the catwalk. The standard procedure was to cry into a sink about losing your identity while having your eyebrows bleached and getting a Mohawk. When the male contestants turned up, the audience naturally assumed there weren’t very many makeover indignities that could be inflicted on them. There are only three hairstyles for men, surely? But that comforting idea died when they gave a contestant called Denzel a “beard weave”, where a lattice of what looked suspiciously like pubic hair was superglued to his chin. To his credit, he didn’t burst into tears.

In fact, for the rest of the series, Denzel kept stoically wearing the beard weave, even though the glue gave him a skin condition and a fellow contestant said it made him look like a “black Abraham Lincoln”. The judges heartily approved – here was the true Top Model spirit.

And that’s what I will miss most when the programme departs from our screens. Most reality TV shows indulge their contestants in the delusion that they might be special, but ANTM always did the opposite. It taught aspiring models that the fashion industry was a cold, callous place where they were valued only for the money they could earn for their employer. No one cared about them as a special snowflake. No one was that interested in their “struggle” or their “journey”.

I would like every middle-class graduate who sighs that their first job is beneath them to be force-fed a whole series. Look, kiddo, I know you think filing and making tea is dull, but at least you aren’t balanced half-naked on a rock in the dead of winter with a tarantula crawling over your face, flogging tasteless jewellery to Qatari trophy wives. Count your blessings. That’s what Tyra Banks would do.

***

I have mellowed since then—in my 40s, I feel much more protective of teenagers from the Midwest, with the limited media literacy of the 2000s, who saw only the premise of escaping their job at Walgreens and trustingly assumed that the adults involved in ANTM had their best interests at heart. One thing that has emerged from the Epstein files is just how cynically modelling agencies have been used as Girlfriend Recruitment machines for skeezy old men; indeed, “Jean Luc Brunel” is a name that appears regularly in the files. He was a French modelling agent who killed himself in prison while awaiting rape charges.

Also, what happened on ANTM, it’s now obvious, went way beyond some tough-love introduction to the bootstrapping realities of the job market.

I had naively assumed that because Reality Check was a Netflix documentary—and more than that, one with the involvement of the show’s key talent (the host Tyra Banks, the exec Ken Hom, and the three musketeers of creative director Jay Alexander, runway coach Miss J and “noted fashion photographer” Nigel Barker)—it was going to soft-soap the show.

We’d maybe get a few wincing reflections on classic problematic photoshoots, like the race-swapping one and the one where they made them all look dead. Maybe even a small reflection on some of the contestants who clearly had eating disorders, or the fact that Janice Dickinson was encouraged to scream YOU HAVE A HIDEOUS BELLY at size 0 teenagers.

But oh no. Reality Check was much more interesting than that. Admittedly, the documentary tiptoed around one of ANTM’s most appalling incidents—when season 2 contestant Shandi got blind drunk in Italy (having eaten very little for days) and was filmed having sex with a male model who had been invited over to the models’ apartments2. The words “probable sexual assault” were never uttered, presumably for legal reasons.

No, the most interesting thing to come out of this documentary is that Tyra Banks is a stone-cold psychopath. She never apologised for anything. She refused to answer the question of why she had stopped talking to her former BFF Jay Alexander after he asked to leave the show in season 8. And when she was asked why she fired the two Jays and Nigel as a condition of continuing the show past its peak, her explanation was that the network had told her there were “no sacred cows.” Had she not fired them, she implied, she might have been next. The concept that she could have made the principled decision not to continue with the show without her three friends and longterm collaborators appears simply never to have occurred to her.

Inevitably, I ended up thinking about Donald Trump, another reality TV star with an innate sense of how to cater to the sadism of his audience, both for The Apprentice and in the MAGA movement. Both of them understand the appeal of cruelty. Both of them cannot process the idea of loyalty outweighing your own naked self-interest. Both of them were wildly successful as a result.

The documentary ends with the news that Miss J suffered a stroke a couple of years ago, which left him unable to speak for a time. He still struggles to walk, which is particularly devastating for a man who prided himself on his catwalk strut. There’s a very touching scene where other Jay and Nigel are filmed with him, and tell him encouragingly that he’s come on so much, to be sitting up and giving interviews. They clearly visited him during his recovery.

Then, in a solo shot, J is asked whether Tyra has been in touch. “Not yet,” he says, and then does a classic Miss J sceptical look:

This cheered me up, honestly. Tyra Banks is now living in Australia, running an ice-cream company (?????). She’s ended up much richer than the other three, but the same bulletproof inauthenticity that made her successful in reality TV means that she is also kind of a monster.

Anyway, that made me think about how for a long time people used to hope that Oprah Winfrey would run for U.S. president, on the basis that she could smash the glass ceiling of sex and race. I think people got the wrong millionaire black female television personality for that gig. Tyra Banks for President? She could have smized and backstabbed her way to the inauguration, no problem.

Helen

PS. I screwed up the venue in last week’s email: I’ll be talking to David Runciman about the film Good Night and Good Luck after a screening at the Regent Street Cinema on May 20.

Quick Links

1. I’ve written before about British politics being America-brained. Here Scott Alexander makes the case that American rightwingers are surprisingly Europe-brained, fixated on things that are true in Europe but not the U.S. (Substack).

2. Right wing luxury beliefs! (Substack)

3. Sometimes when my blood pressure is too low, I like to read about people who bought their London houses in the 1990s and 2000s, and the insane price growth they feel is their human right. Here’s a great example: boo hoo, my mum bought a five-bed in Highbury for £750,000 in 2003 and no one wants to buy it today for £3.3m, so we might have to—balls up handkerchief—consider taking £2.8m for it. (BTW, £750k in 2003 is £1.4m now, adjusted for inflation.)

The paperback of The Genius Myth is coming in June! Great news for tightwads/people with weak wrists who find hardbacks a bit much. Here’s the fancy new cover:

This week on Page 94, we talked about some of the less-covered stories in the Epstein Files, and (from me) the Labour party psychodrama underlying the whole saga. And I have a couple of new events in the diary: I’ll be talking about genius with Alice Sherwood at the Jewish Book Festival on March 8, and to David Runciman about the film Good Night and Good Luck after a screening at the [CORRECTED] Regent Street Cinema on May 20.

Helen

How Silicon Valley Compares With China

I’m off to San Francisco again next week, so I particularly enjoyed catching up on Dan Wang’s annual letter, much of which is devoted to comparing the West Coast with China. (Wang just published a book, Breakneck, comparing China’s “engineering” culture with America’s “laywerly” one. It’s on my To Read pile.)

“Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I want to say that I am rooting for San Francisco,” he writes. “It’s tempting to gawk at the craziness of the culture, as much of the east coast media tends to do. Yes, one can quickly find people who speak with the conviction of a cultist; no, I will not inject the peptides proffered by strangers. But there’s more to the Bay Area than unusual health practices. It is, after all, a place that creates not only new products, but also new modes of living. I’m struck that some east coast folks insist to me that driverless cars can’t work and won’t be accepted, even as these vehicles populate the streets of the Bay Area. Coverage of Silicon Valley increasingly reminds me of coverage of China, where a legacy media reporter might parachute in, write a dispatch on something that looks deranged, and leave without moving past caricature.”

I didn’t much like SF on my first visit, last March. The downtown was empty and haunted by people in terrible mental and drug-induced distress, sprawled over shopping carts or flat-out on the sidewalk. Six months later, the city felt more alive with shoppers and tourists, and therefore less intimidating. Getting a Waymo was genuinely impressive and futuristic. There are still far too many bloody hills. Still, though, there is a sense of optimism in California—that the future could be better than the present1. This time, I’m going south to the tech area, which promises to be a different experience again2.

PS. Wang had the same experience as me with book promotion (albeit at a higher level.) He once did SIX podcasts in a day! But came to my conclusion—podcasts are a substitute for books, not an advert for them:“Again, who is listening to all these podcasts? I don’t much look at my book sales, but it doesn’t feel like podcasts move the needle. And a book might create a lot of social media buzz, with all the right people saying all the right things, but Twitter too doesn’t drive sales. It was two platforms that moved a lot of my books: television and radio. People bought after seeing me on CNN or hearing me on NPR.”

The New Yorker ($) has published a brilliant investigation of a truly haunting case: a Chinese-American man and his partner/employee who posed as a surrogacy agency to commission more than two dozen babies. They lied to the surrogates—who were largely told that they were helping a childless couple—and some discovered the truth several months into their pregnancies. But under “gestational surrogacy,” the women weren’t genetically related to the babies, and so had no rights over them. “One described feeling as if she were stranded in the middle of the ocean, pregnant and without a life raft.”

Quick Links

1. “Titles mean something because they mark one’s status—where one stands relative to others. There are many such “positional goods”. If everyone could get a degree from Harvard, its value would diminish greatly because it would no longer signal that the degree-holder is special. If everyone could afford a Rolex or own an original Picasso, a lot fewer people would want a Rolex or an original Picasso.” One of the hallmarks of Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels is that they’re an attempt to imagine a post-scarcity society. This post from psychologist Paul Bloom does the same thing, exploring how much stuff would be left unaffected by abundance. It also leads with a picture of Dwight Shrute, so bonus points for that.

2. Jonathan Bate, one of the world’s leading Shakespeare scholars (and Swiftie), has joined Substack. His first post is about how everyone gets hamartia wrong.

3. “In the Moon Under Water it is always quiet enough to talk. The house possesses neither a radio nor a piano, and even on Christmas Eve and such occasions the singing that happens is of a decorous kind. . . They are particular about their drinking vessels at the Moon Under Water, and never, for example, make the mistake of serving a pint of beer in a handleless glass.” It’s the 80th anniversary of George Orwell describing his ideal pub, The Moon Under Water (Substack).

4. Martin Robbins has made a lovely little doc about the pothole-riddled road he’s obsessed with, and it’s kind of wild that a poster with a drone, a dream and a couple of bags of cold-lay macadam (sorry, Martin) can now make a broadcast quality news report like this.

5. “When the Westminster pack gets a faltering politician in its sights, its members know that the writer that gives the death blow to a minister or adviser can make a professional reputation doing it. With a prime minister the stakes are even higher.” Mark Urban on the “STARMER ON THE BRINK” mania this week.

See you next time!

This year, I’m consciously trying to read more and scroll less. Click through below to gaze into the abyss of my January reading list.

Helen

There’s a very sweet line in this interview with the biographer Hermione Lee, where she makes an offhand remark about TV no longer doing substantive book conversations any more. But of course, who needs TV! There’s a place right here on Substack. This interview renewed my interest in seeing/reading all the Stoppard plays, which is handy, because I’m due to go to Arcadia next week.

And what a great line this is: “I took as the epigraph for my biography of Stoppard a line from Arcadia: ‘It’s wanting to know that makes us matter, otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.’”

If you’re anything less than Chronically Online, you might have missed the odd interlude where an official American government account entreated citizens to follow the example of a suicidal penguin in a Werner Herzog documentary.

This superficially inexplicable endorsement of wandering off into the frozen beyond is, Max Read thinks, part of the ideology of “suicide rightism”. MAGA has also taken the “Sky King” — an airport worker who stole a plane and flew about for a bit before fatally crashing — to its heart.

What’s going on? “Fascism is a literally suicidal ideology, one obsessed with purging the body politic to the point of total self-negation,” writes Read. “What’s funny about Suicide Rightism is how direct it is about all this. You don’t need some big theoretical analysis; there’s no level of abstraction to move through. It’s just pretty straightforwardly pro-suicide. I don’t think you have to be a professional psychologist to understand why dramatic, attention-grabbing suicide might be appealing to semi-employed guys who spend 14 hours a day watching Asmongold or whatever. Its promise is that all the pain and frustration you feel can be visited on the people you believe authored it—and then ended.”

Quick Links

1. “America’s history also sees such overlaps because of the extent to which its technology speeds up. Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, heroes of the Apollo 11 mission, were all in their late teens by the time that Orville Wright died, and there were still a handful of former American slaves alive at the time of the Moon landing.” Ed West’s list of “crossover people” is fascinating (Substack).

2. Demographically, Homer Simpson is MAGA now, but Mr Burns is a Democrat (Substack).

3. “For a long time, I held my eating disorder out in front of me, a well-rendered excuse for why I simply couldn’t perfect my body — why my “imperfect” body was, in fact, a political statement. Still, as soon as I heard about GLP-1s, probably three years ago at this point, I knew there was no world in which I would not end up trying them.” On taking GLP-1s as a former anorexic (Substack).

4. Radiohead have posted their walking-in music.

5. “They flee from him that sometime did him seek. Poor old Peter Mandelson (still Lord Mandelson at the time of typing, but he should probably hold off ordering any stationery) spent Tuesday discovering that you’re never more alone than when your colleagues discover you were selling them out to a paedophile.” In the disgrace of Mandy, Rob Hutton has truly found his muse (The Critic).

6. Think you like football? Not as much as this guy’s parents liked football.

That’s all for now! See you next time.