The Bluestocking 340: You've Never Had It So Gourd
channel surfing through his memories
Happy Friday!
And hello from week two of the campaign trail in Pennsylvania. This week found me in windswept Erie, for a Kamala Harris rally, and the middle of a field in Volant, to look at Tim Walz surrounded by gourds.
Quite sweetly, they let the crowd take the pumpkins and flowers home after the speech; I saw people in the American equivalent of wellies happily carrying handfuls of pot plants to their cars. It’s a good sign for the Harris campaign that they’re taking rural voters seriously—the middle of PA is Trump country alright, but anything that can be done to peel off a few voters is vital in a race this close.
In the middle of all this, I watched a bizarre Fox town hall with Trump and an all-female audience—who turned out to be stacked with Republicans. He was on his usual, incomprehensible form.
Next week I’m off to Georgia, which is currently looking much more favourable for the Republicans. I had hoped to go to an NRA event in Savannah, but that was cancelled because of “campaign scheduling changes,” aka it was revealed that the CEO pled no contest to animal cruelty charges in 1979 when his fraternity tortured a cat to death. (The previous CEO of the NRA had, er, some of the organisation’s money resting in his account and was recently pushed out.)
Helen
PS. In plug corner this time, Armando Iannucci and I are doing a fun little weekly series on political language, starting next Thursday on Radio 4 (just after In Our Time). It’s called Strong Message Here, and you can listen to the trailer here. We are doing a 15-minute version for linear radio, and a longer version for online.
We’re Still Living in A Fight Club World (The Atlantic, gift link)
The film quickly establishes the Narrator’s emotional reticence. Prone to digression and omission, the Narrator is elusive despite his constant chattering. His wry descriptions of his IKEA furniture, business travel, and chronic sleep deprivation establish the detached mood of the film, which presents late-20th-century America as an immersive infomercial. His irony-tinged voiceover, which Fincher pairs with images inspired by commercials and music videos, is more performance than disclosure. The capitalist fog of the Narrator’s life is so thick that he struggles to tell his own story, channel surfing through his memories.
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It’s been 25 years since Fight Club—and therefore also The Matrix. What a year for films about how terrible it is to work in an office.
The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong? (New York Times)
D.E.I. theory and debates over nomenclature sometimes obscured real-world barriers to inclusion. The strategic plan for Michigan’s renowned arboretum and botanical gardens calls for employees to rethink the use of Latin and English plant names, which “actively erased” other “ways of knowing,” and adopt “a ‘polycentric’ paradigm, decentering singular ways of knowing and cocreating meaning through a variety of epistemic frames, including dominant scientific and horticultural modalities, Two-Eyed Seeing, Kinomaage and other cocreated power realignments.”
Only one sentence in the 37-page plan is devoted to the biggest impediment to making the gardens accessible to a more diverse array of visitors: It is hard to get there without a car.
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This NYT report on the U.S. college with the biggest commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion bolsters my sense that the median opinion on this stuff is not wholehearted enthusiasm or apocalyptic terror but a weary irritation at more box-ticking bureaucracy.
Also, amid the volunteer stasi business, some DEI stuff is genuinely useful: one administrator’s “work often dealt with practical obstacles to inclusion, like how to arrange class schedules to accommodate students who also worked the night shift.”
Quick Links
“Only a few years ago, getting a kilogram of material to orbit cost somewhere between $10,000 and $20,000. But in 2015, SpaceX changed the world by successfully executing a controlled landing of the first stage of the Falcon 9, the company’s smaller rocket. . . Today, the price per kilogram to orbit is around $2700.” James O’Malley reluctantly concedes that Elon Musk is sometimes good (Substack).
“This is a sore subject for [Allan] Lichtman. Whether he got 2016 totally right or merely sort of right might seem like a quibble; surely he was closer to the mark than most experts. But a forecaster who changes his methodology after the fact has no credibility. When I brought the matter up with Lichtman in a Zoom interview, he became angry.” My colleague Gilad on that guy who claims his “keys” can accurately predict the result of the American election (The Atlantic).
“When I became editor about eight years ago, I was told by experts, by the whole culture around journalism, that The Atlantic was going to have its lunch eaten by Buzzfeed, bots, Gawker, HuffPo, and on and on. There are graveyards filled with web-only products whose existence was predicated on wealthy ownership, programmatic ad revenue, and virality. We went a different route, and we picked the right route.” The big boss talks about why the Atlantic has been successful (Common Good).
Thanks to Caroline Crampton’s newly relaunched newsletter for the suggestion of this insanely annoying word puzzle, Alphaguess. What is a word that sits alphabetically between “entryism” and “enunciate”?
Also from Caroline: people have unlocked the secrets of the Universal New Yorker cartoon caption.
The Trump campaign is keeping a Burn Book of banned staffers who won’t be asked to serve in a second administration; including anyone linked to the disastrously toxic Project 2025 (Politico).
Oxford University scrapped the requirement that anyone wanting to be nominated as Chancellor had to get nominations from dons. You Will Never Guess What Happened Next: the application process got spammed by randos from Lahore.
Also this week in impossible games: the Financial Times asks you to rescue the British economy.
See you next time! If you would like to subscribe, click below:
"It’s been 25 years since Fight Club—and therefore also The Matrix. What a year for films about how terrible it is to work in an office." Don't forget Office Space, also released in 99. A sort of American Ealing Comedy for GenX nerds, featuring one of cinema's greatest middle managers. Yeah, I'm gonna go right ahead and ask you to watch it this weekend.
I liked the interview about the Atlantic, especially the bit about profitability as a byproduct of success. So much journalism in the UK now (especially local newspapers) is about profit before quality and that's a recipe for failure.