The Bluestocking 338: The Gorilla and the samurai sword
a white, CGI-rendered void reminiscent of Catholic purgatory
Happy Friday!
I have been spending a lot of time with JD Vance lately—so far, only virtually. For the Atlantic, I watched the vice-presidential debate, where he couldn’t quite bring himself to say the 2020 election was stolen. (He seems to have gotten over his reluctance since.)
Helen
PS. The latest episode of Page 94 covers the ghosts of Tories past (yes, I’ve been reading Boris Johnson’s memoir); the end of the daily Evening Standard; and how Mohammed Fayed got away with being a sex pest for so long.
PPS. Also, I’m on Have I Got News For You tonight—I’ll be interested to see how the edit shakes out, because although I was delighted to be making jokes about a new government, my sense is that people haven’t yet got a handle on the personalities involved in Labour, and without that shorthand, it’s tougher to land a punchline.
Are Colleges Getting Disability Accommodations Wrong? (Chronicle)
Advocates of a more relaxed approach see no reason to be unduly alarmed about the rise in such accommodations, despite a lack of evidence about their effectiveness. Nor are they worried about potentially misdiagnosed students. As long as significant numbers of students with disabilities are being missed by the system, they argue, our focus should be on reaching them. “The percentage of students affiliated with our office is still lower than national numbers” of people with disabilities, Kipley said, and he’s right. Among undergraduates, nationally, 18 percent of male students, 22 percent of female students, and 54 percent of nonbinary students identify as having a disability. They are clearly suffering.
Mental-health disorders are on the rise. For advocates, it only makes sense to err on the side of affirmation and accommodation, with whatever tools we have at our disposal. The system might not be perfect, and a few people will game it, but that’s a small price for reducing stigma and supporting disability rights.
That is the dominant perspective on campuses, and it is the reason accommodations look the way they do today.
But what if the price of that approach is even higher than it seems? What if the issues go beyond misdiagnosed students, misallocated resources, and ineffective or unfair interventions? Could the accommodation system also be contributing to the problems it seeks to solve, and actively hurting the people it is intended to help?
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Brave article by Alan Levinovitz about the creep of disability accommodations in universities—which are disproportionately being secured by the wealthiest students, often without a clinical diagnosis (or one from a pay-to-play doctor).
The contours of this debate feel rather familiar—the broad Right unfairly attacks such accommodations as a straight-up grift, the broad Left gets over-defensive and blindly defends them. That polarisation makes it hard for anyone to see what’s really happening.
Bluestocking recommends: Ludwig. (With the proviso that I’m only on episode four of six, and this is the sort of series that really needs to nail the landing.) David Mitchell plays a puzzle obsessive whose identical twin brother (get over it) has just gone missing. Oh, and the twin is a murder detective. So he has to assume his identity to find him, but ends up solving a lot of delicious murdles along the way.
When I was young, Jonathan Creek was the series that made me want to write for television. (Remember the one with the gorilla and the samurai sword? BLISS. Rik Mayall and the mirrors? HEAVEN. ) Ludwig is the closest I’ve come to finding a replacement.
Quick Links
“I had been prepared to encounter the kind of conservatives Norman Mailer memorably described as ‘people who went to their piano lessons when they were kids,’ but it wasn’t that kind of crowd. They were bright. They’d had radical and unpopular ideas and had stuck to them. And now they were carrying on like winners. America!” Step into the time machine and appreciate this piece on the hot, new young conservatives of 1995 (New York Times, archived).
Thanks to Matt Muir’s extremely chaotic and brain-busting links compendium Web Curios for this one: a Google game that asks “which of these came first”? Ponte Vecchio or Hampton Court Palace? Kiefer Sutherland or How Green Was My Valley? (Google Arts and Culture)
“Gladwell ends his new Tipping Point on the same note of certainty as his original. ‘Epidemics have rules,’ he writes. ‘They have boundaries.’ The tools to alter their course ‘are sitting on the table, right in front of us.’ I envy his confidence. But I’ve lived through the past 25 years too, and that’s not my takeaway” My colleague Gal on the new Malcolm Gladwell (Atlantic, gift link). I enjoy Gladwell’s writing style but I mistrust the elegance of his premises. Anything that neat is suspicious. Real life is messy.
This newsletter is always here for a great Steven Seagal anecdote, and this interview with Troy Evans has a beautiful one. It also discusses The Frighteners, a deeply under-rated horror film directed by Peter Jackson and starring Michael J. Fox (AV Club).
“[Jordan] Peterson stands in the middle of a white, CGI-rendered void reminiscent of Catholic purgatory. Several rows of students, notebooks in hand, sit in silence on his left and right, while a red digitized banner hangs overhead. Two words are written across it, summing up Peterson’s current talking point: ‘NIHILISTIC DOOM.’” Luke Winkie gets expelled from the Peterson Academy, which seems to me to appeal to the same cohort who would once have joined Mensa (Slate).
My colleague Adam Serwer on the trend in the US for red states to conscript people to snitch on each other—his first case study is a divorce where the male partner is suing his ex and her friends because she had an abortion (The Atlantic).
“Why did Japan and South Korea have similar “growth miracles” in the twentieth century even though Japan was the historic colonizer and Korea its colony? Because they both adopted the key institutions. Why is Ethiopia poor even though it was never a colony? Because, like its African neighbors, it has not yet adopted them.” It’s safe to say that Coleman Hughes did not like Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book (Free Press, £)
For balance, here is Coates dealing extremely calmly with a tough interview on his reporting from Palestine. He’s received a lot of praise online for this (YouTube).
“Lawyers asked her whether she was an alcoholic, and whether she had “a secret inclination for exhibitionism.” In response, Gisèle [Pelicot] stated that every day since the beginning of the trial, she’d been intentionally humiliated, and that she understood why most rape victims don’t press charges. Although she appears composed on the surface, she has said that, internally, she is “a field of ruins.” Even so, a few weeks into the trial, one defense lawyer, Nadia El Bouroumi, posted an Instagram Reel of herself in her car, miming to the Wham song “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” (She later deleted the video and posted a statement saying she was profoundly sorry if her meaning had been misinterpreted.)” Every detail from the Pelicot trial is more insane than the last (The Atlantic).
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everything about the Pelicot case is, to say the very least, extremely dispiriting. grateful for your basket of other links to cheer me up.
Combining your first two items I’m recommending “English Teacher,” a really gay sitcom on Disney+ for its portrayal of a high school student with Asymptomatic Tourette’s syndrome (ATS, according to the student’s best friend). The show is a witty send up of pieties (trans, teenage fragility, school admin., hook up culture) Brian Jordan Alvarez writes, produces and stars. I want to be in his writers’ room.
As always, thanks for the gift article.