The Bluestocking 332: Palmer Luckey and brain diseases

kills you in real life when you die in a video game

Happy Friday!

I’ve been in Chicago this week, watching the Democratic National Convention, and have written about the Democratic messaging on abortion and gender. After the RNC had Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt, the Democrats are trying to reclaim the mantle of nothing-to-prove masculinity, courtesy of Alpha Wife Guys Barack Obama and Doug Emhoff.

“Harris’s campaign has so far left it to others to present her as a history-making proposition, presumably because they think that the idea alienates some voters—and leaves many more unmoved,” I wrote. “Let the right obsess about the cultural implications of rampaging, untamable hordes of childless women, the thinking seems to go, while we get back to talking about how Donald Trump is a convicted felon.”

From watching all the speeches and talking to grassroots Democrats, the other thing I would say is. . . our long national 2020 is over! Abortion is back to being about “women and girls”, everyone is talking about freedom, and those acronyms that read like wifi passwords have been banished. I’m sure the “anti woke” sphere will still persist—it’s still good business for the right—but they are not kicking back at the dominant tendency in America’s center-left party any more. (I’m writing this before the Harris speech, so joke’s on me if she opens with “I’m a proud BIPOC LGBTQIA ally, and I’m here on AAPI Hate Awareness day to talk about cisnormativity and white silence.”)

Even AOC—now a great survivor, since several other Squad members have lost primary challenges—has decided to drop any hint of activist-speak. My colleague Yair pointed out that her 2020 speech pledged to “recognize and repair the wounds of racial injustice, colonization, misogyny, and homophobia, and to propose and build reimagined systems of immigration and foreign policy that turn away from the violence and xenophobia of our past.” This time, she talked about how there’s “nothing wrong with working for a living.”

yes that is brat green

Let me leave you with the United Center merch store, since you can chart a party’s fortunes by what it’s selling—and what its activists are buying. This morning at the hotel, pretty much all that was left was a big stack of BIDEN T-shirts. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Helen

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Palmer Luckey, American Vulcan (Tablet)

In his spare time, when he is not providing U.S. Customs and Border Patrol with AI-powered long-range sensors, or Volodymyr Zelenskyy with drones to attack high-value Russian targets, or winning first place in the Texas Renaissance Festival’s costume contest with historically meticulous renderings of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn sewn and stitched by his wife, Nicole—who’s been at his side for 16 of his 31 years on earth—Luckey recently built a bypass for his peripheral nervous system to experiment with giving himself superhuman reflexes; vestibular implants to pipe sounds into his skull so that instead of having to call him and wait for him to pick up, Anduril employees could just pick up a designated Palmer Phone and talk straight into his head; and a virtual reality headset that—by tying three explosive charges to a narrow-band photosensor that can detect when the screen flashes red at a specific frequency (i.e., GAME OVER)—kills you in real life when you die in a video game.

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The guy who invented the Oculus Rift is now a multibillionaire defense contractor, and really letting his freak inventor flag fly. Weep together with me: this is the kind of profile you can only write when you get access, which no one gives you any more. Sob.

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Brendan George Ko for The New York Times

They All Got A Mysterious Brain Disease. They’re Fighting To Learn Why (New York Times, gift link)

Three years later, however, no satisfactory explanation has been found, and the New Brunswick syndrome remains shrouded in mystery — and controversy. At the heart of the matter is the question of whether something in the environment may be responsible, at least in part, for the onset of the patients’ illness. It’s a question that underscores not only the tangled relationship between public health and patients’ rights, but also the inherently confounding nature of neurological conditions. In the absence of answers, what began as a puzzling medical mystery has been transformed into a situation rife with suspicion: accusations of nefarious plots to silence doctors, scientists’ leaking internal documents and a growing community of patients and advocates intent on proving the government’s hand in a coverup.

“We don’t have tinfoil hats,” Tim Beatty said of the provincial government last year. “But if you are looking to breed a group of people to believe in a conspiracy theory, they have done a fantastic job.”

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This article is about a cluster of people in New Brunswick who were all diagnosed with neurological issues that were tentatively attributed to environmental poisoning. My “hmm” can be seen from space, for several reasons: 1) there was a bewildering array of symptoms, which is always a red flag; 2) the fact that the cluster was diagnosed by the same doctor; 3) The patient group talked about getting Erin Brockovich involved, which is exactly what the families of the girls at LeRoy did, back when they thought their daughters were suffering from an environmental toxin rather than a mass psychogenic illness.

Now, there is clearly something wrong with the people involved in this story—several have died. And the use of pesticides—poisons by design—is something that should be tightly regulated and monitored. But this reporting does show how difficult it is to convert symptoms into a diagnosis, in the absence of a clinical test. Medicine is sometimes a lot more jazz-handsy than it can seem, given all the amazing technological advances we’ve made.

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Quick Links

1. “For the purposes of this story, let’s call my friend Anamika, Sanskrit for “the anonymous woman.” Apart from myself, no one in her circle of family and friends knows that she has spent the past three-and-a-half years in a library.” Weird to know that people are out there living your dream (Multi-storied, Substack).

2. Some more tickets have been released for my talk with Tim Minchin in Brighton on September 3. Book here.

3. One of the reasons I’m still on Twitter was that it occasionally sends you down a research-rabbit-hole. Did you know that assassinated Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe had a grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who was a terrible war criminal (even by the standards of Japanese war criminals) but escaped being hanged after the end of WWII because the Americans decided he would be the least communist and most pro-U.S. choice for Japanese leader?

4. “The caricature of a lonely, embittered man, racist, sexist, misanthropic is all quite true; he was dreadful; but Larkin was more than this: poetry was his access to something better and more permanent.” Lovely post by Henry Oliver about one of my favourite poets, Philip Larkin, whose beautiful verse is sometimes incredibly hard to reconcile with the reactionary old bugger he comes off as in his letters (Common Reader).

5. Paul Bloom offers three productivity tips for the restless. Horrifyingly, one of them is “have a daily routine and start work early.” I mean, sure, we could all do that. Except I can’t. (Small Potatoes).

6. Very wonky, very good interrogation by Jesse Singal of a research paper that claimed to debunk the Cass Report (Singal Minded).

7. “For the people targeting me, I could have been almost anyone: it was about the pleasure of collective feeling in choosing a victim.” Sarah Ditum on how not to go mad when you get internet hate (Tox Report)

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