The Bluestocking 329: Ballerinas and Billionaires

“What do you mean, ‘visualized the images’?”

Happy Friday!

This week, I went to a “Bat Hibernaculum” and wrote about the weird obsessions of the Extremely Online Right. Come for the longhouse, stay for the NPCs, be mildly sad I didn’t get into phrenology.

Helen

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Meet the Queen of The Tradwives (The Sunday Times, £)

Hannah Neeleman was pregnant with her eighth child and she had two due dates. The first was for a baby, obviously. The second, just under two weeks later, was for a beauty pageant.

Neeleman had been crowned Mrs American in August 2023 at a Las Vegas mega-casino and resort, so she was invited back to the city to compete in Mrs World, parading around the stage in a swimsuit and 5in heels, shoulders back and hip popped, spray-tanned, glistening — and 12 days postpartum. Obviously.

“I had known it was coming,” says Neeleman, 34, sitting in her kitchen in rural Utah, two of her children literally swinging off her long golden hair. “So I had prepared.” During the pregnancy it took brute strength, guts and bravery to make sure she could eventually look so perfectly pretty. She kept fit, weightlifting before her children woke up. She had ice baths, lowering herself into the irrigation ditches on the farm. And she took iron supplements to speed up the healing.

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This profile of the tradwife influencer behind Ballerina Farm has caused a lot of discourse—is Hannah Neeleman living the dream by marrying the heir to a fortune and having his eight adorable babies? Or is her life a nightmare, constantly pregnant, unable to get out of bed some days with tiredness, having been forced to give up her place at Juillard?

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Photo by Scottsdale Mint on Unsplash

Silicon Valley’s Billionaire Elegy (Wired)

The idea that a brand-new wealth tax desperately opposed by the nation’s biggest political donors will get through a divided Congress is a hallucination that even ChatGPT wouldn’t propose.

Andreessen and Horowitz are smart enough to know this, so their objections come off as both paranoid and self-interested. But I think there’s something more happening, an element that’s often cited to explain why some Silicon Valley people have turned to Trump: They resent how the media, some of the “woke” population, and left-leaning politicians don’t appreciate them, and even vilify them. In Trumpland, their wealth and the wisdom supposedly associated with it is respected.

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In the 2010s, Peter Thiel was an outlier in Silicon Valley for backing Trump. This time, he’s in the middle of a big pack—and here, Steven Levy explains why.

Spoiler: Biden hasn’t made them feel special.

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Photo by Nikolai Chernichenko on Unsplash

Revelations (Blocked and Reported)

“Wait,” I said. “What do you mean, ‘visualized the images’?”

Everyone blinked and looked at me like I’d just grown a couple of devil horns out of my forehead. 

“He pictures them. In his mind.” 

“That’s just a metaphor,” I said. “Right?” 

Apparently not. Everyone, it seemed, could see actual pictures in their minds without even trying. Everyone, that is, except me. 

“Picture an apple,” my mom said. 

I closed my eyes. All I saw was the back of my eyelids. 

My family immediately started taunting me. My dad described his apple in minute detail. It had little white spots on it, he said. And a stem. My mom said her apple was as clear as a photo. My nephew said his apple was green. Janna said her apple was in a bowl on a table. She could make it twirl in the air if she wanted. She could make a pie out of it. 

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Katie Herzog has aphantasia—she can’t visualize images in her mind. But, she discovers, the condition might involve more than that: “aphantasia is really an issue not just of visualization but of recall, and studies show that aphantasiacs report diminished autobiographical memory.” I’m at the other end of the spectrum from Katie—I enjoy remembering the insane old Victorian building that was my school, which is now a retirement village, and swooping through the wood-panelled music room and the “marble hall” in my memory.

I was also stoked to find out that my favourite scientific dilettante/wince-inducing racist Francis Galton originally described this condition in the late 1800s, observing that many of his scientist friends had it.

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Quick Links

1. “Unfortunately, the conditions that made Bell Labs so successful were highly historically contingent and not the sort of thing that could be deliberately recreated.” (Substack)

2. “Douglas Adams, still only 40 years old, would never finish another book.” Now there’s a sobering phrase (Filfre.net)

3. “The list of ways in which RSD manifested itself spread way beyond the original question. It was said to include sensitivity to failure, to arguments, to not having your ideas responded to in meetings.” Here’s another very internet-defined diagnosis: RSD, or rejection sensitivity dysphoria. (BPS)

4. I’m interviewing Jess Phillips at the Kiln in Kilburn on Thursday, August 8. Tickets here.

5. The phrase “luxury beliefs” has become a dunk against the left—that’s a shame, argues Yascha Mounk, because applied more fairly (and narrowly), it’s a useful term (Persuasion, Substack).

6. If you want an insight into how the traditional media still hasn’t got its head around new media, look how little coverage there has been of the fact that Ava Kris Tyson, the former BFF of MrBeast—the biggest YouTuber in the world—has been ditched from his channel over grooming allegations (BBC).

7. “We are not remotely prepared for the avalanche of bullshit that LLMs are going to send down the mountain towards our society.” David Epstein interviews the tech reporter Evan Ratcliff, who hooked up an AI voice synthesizer and Chat GPT, and trained it to impersonate him to his friends and acquaintances (David Epstein, Substack).

8. Extremely tough oped by Gordon Brown on the Washington Post publisher Will Lewis’s previous career doing clean-up for phone hacking (Guardian).

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