The Bluestocking 345: Red Dots and Goalhanger
Comedy is an amoral zone
Happy Friday!
And well done for making it to the end of the week. This edition brings you a little game, a longread about podcasts, and
Helen
The End of Denial (New York, £)
If you slice a map of Corona into the jagged multi-block Tetris pieces known as election districts, you’ll see that every one of them went for Biden in 2020. Four years later, most went for Trump or narrowly for Harris, sometimes by a single vote. A heavily immigrant enclave of 110,000, the neighborhood is almost impossible to navigate without some Spanish and is effectively New York’s flyover country. Anyone who has taken the 7 train to see a Mets game or watch the U.S. Open has floated above its commercial thoroughfare of Roosevelt Avenue, which flows in from neighboring Elmhurst, another district that grew much redder in 2024. Corona was devastated by COVID. It is also one of the places that has borne the brunt of the migrant crisis, which has brought more than 200,000 new arrivals to the city since 2022, when Biden lifted Trump-era border restrictions and Texas governor Greg Abbott started busing asylum seekers north. While pockets of midtown Manhattan and the Upper West Side mounted resistance against new migrant-inhabited hotels, and violence and disarray around shelters in Randalls Island and Clinton Hill brought tensions of their own, it was along Roosevelt Avenue that the influx was most visible and controversial.
The essential issue there, as an aide to one local Democratic politician puts it, is that “the underground economy is completely overground.” Roosevelt Avenue and its surroundings have become saturated with two types of new arrivals: unlicensed street vendors selling food or merchandise and sex workers soliciting customers outside makeshift brothels. There is consensus among elected officials and residents that many of the women are sex-trafficking victims from Central and South America working to pay off their debt to smugglers. These factors have led to what residents describe as a quality-of-life disaster, coinciding with an uptick in crimes such as robbery and felony assault, which increased locally by about 50 percent in the past two years.
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This reporting from Queens—the other side of the river from Manhattan—investigates an under-analysed phenomenon. Why did New York, that supposed bastion of bicoastal liberalism, swing towards Donald Trump? Simon van Zuylen-Wood finds tensions over migrant housing (which, if the extortionate price of my very basic hotel in Queens last month is anything to go by, is putting real pressure on the borough), street crime, Gaza and school performance.
But he also finds another reason why store owners—many migrants themselves—went red this cycle: prostitution. I really haven’t seen this covered much elsewhere, but it’s just a hard fact that leftwing attempts to destigmatise and legitimise “sex work” often falter because people’s personal experience of living near brothels and red light districts is that their streets are now filled with scary men (pimps) and skeevy men (punters), and their kids have to walk past women with, as one person describes it here, “boobs out.” Here is another very fashionable position among college-educated liberals—and NGOs—that is unpopular with working-class voters, many of them from immigrant backgrounds. The question for the Democrats now is: who has to yield?
PS. Not that you would know it from this election campaign, when she refused to answer Axios’s question on the subject, but Kamala Harris was once in favour of decriminalising prostitution. She said in 2019 that “we need to stop arresting these prostitutes and instead go after the Johns and the pimps, because we were criminalizing the women”. But she said in 2008 that decriminalisation would put out “a welcome mat out for pimps and prostitutes to come on into San Francisco”. So who knows.
The Inside Story of Goalhanger (Esquire)
By the end of 2021, The Rest is History had sold out its first live show. But it wasn’t until spring that Goalhanger unveiled its follow-up: The Rest is Politics.
Alastair Campbell attended the same school as Gary Lineker in Leicester in the 1970s, albeit a few years apart, and the latter’s occasionally outspoken views on government policy brought them back in touch. The Goalhanger boss spotted an opportunity, and approached Campbell about starting a discussion-and-debate show with a Tory counterpart of his choice.
“He got the hump for a bit and said it would be an impossible idea,” Pastor remembers. “Then he drew up a list of 10.”
Campbell crowdsourced the names on Instagram. Rory Stewart, the former Conservative MP and leadership candidate who had recently had his whip suspended for voting against a no-deal Brexit, was by far the most popular with Campbell’s followers.
Things could have been very different. “Alastair takes the piss out of me because I suggested Dominic Cummings,” Pastor laughs.
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Behind-the-scenes look at the Goalhanger empire, which is a huge media success story in an otherwise fairly bleak landscape. It is quite funny to me, though, that Marina Hyde can no longer rude about Alastair Campbell. I wonder if it’s killing her inside?
Quick Links
Since people seem to love the games, here’s another: Tolkien or antidepressant. Genuinely tough.
“I’d read Aristotle’s Poetics almost exactly 20 years earlier during the first weeks of my degree course, but had retained little memory of those founding principles. A buckled mill wheel however I could relate to. That in essence is what comedy is. It looks like a wheel, it ostensibly acts like a wheel, but then it veers off in another direction entirely. If you don’t get that analogy then you probably don’t get comedy. Comedy is an amoral zone. The rules are different there. It isn’t intended to be a security blanket or a smug affirmation of your world view. If anything it serves to pull the rug from underneath you.” Unexpectedly great archive interview with Ken Dodd on the art of comedy. Thanks to Matt Muir for the link.
‘As someone who is sympathetic to the Keir Starmer project, I worry that a badly implemented law could prove hugely damaging in a few years time. “Keir Starmer wants to kill your gran” could be the new “Keir Starmer doesn’t know what a woman is’”. Another assisted dying sceptic makes themselves known (James O’Malley, Substack).
I’m on Bluesky, which has this week seen a wholesale migration of political journalists, thinktankers, NGO people, etc. It’s like Twitter, only you will be annoyingly scolded for not using alt-text instead of being force-fed footage of muggings. An improvement? Just about.
“Superiority feeds complacency. When the world you deal in can be contained safely within the borders of a TV screen, it’s easy to begin to believe that you really do have all the answers — especially when you have a tame audience constantly affirming that you’re all on the right side of history together. As Oliver said, in a recent segment on Robert F Kennedy Jr, ‘it does show just how easy it is to reel people in when you’re spouting self-assured bullshit on an unchallenged platform’. Presumably, this was never intended as a self-own, but it perfectly describes the situation of the late-night host, grown flabby on endless audience affirmation untempered by responsibility.” Sarah Ditum on the strange consensus among US talk show hosts that they are not part of the Democrats’ messaging problem (Unherd).
This Vanity Fair piece about a woman who was Cormac McCarthy’s “secret muse” for several decades after they met (when she was 16 and he was 42) has been roundly mocked on Twitter. The case for the prosecution is that the author a) seems unbothered by the grooming aspect of all this; b) is doing a bad Cormac McCarthy impression throughout. But my main takeaway is that . . . there’s lots of bits of this account I just don’t believe. Beware when someone tells you the perfect story, because stories aren’t true. (One small example: Britt claims that she recognised McCarthy at a motel from the picture on the back of a copy of his novel that she owned. But that novel was out of print at the time, and the only edition that existed didn’t have an author photograph on it. No one needs to be lying—we all remake our memories all the time. But this is why fact-checkers exist.)
For sheer knifery, James Marriott’s review of Jordan Peterson’s We Who Wrestle With God wins (Times, £). But somehow Rowan Williams’s calm, generous criticism—“he relies a lot on rather dated Christian commentaries (and seems to have a limited acquaintance with Hebrew, a drawback for a project like this)”—is more devastating (Guardian). The ex-Archbishop is a proper intellectual.
“Somehow if the landowners suffer — even if it isn’t really by very much — then it’s always curtains for them and a disaster for the rest of us.” David Aaronovitch thinks the farmers’ protests are pretty much a straight re-run of the fox hunting debate of the 2000s (Substack).
That’s all for now! See you next time. Hit reply to send me a message, or subscribe below if you haven’t done so already. We are tantalisingly close to being 25,000-strong.
Marina Hyde did recently make a very droll observation about how it was surprising that of all the famous British Campbells, it was Naomi rather than Alastair who’s had to testify at The Hague. You could hear the stifled laughter in the studio.
Never mind Alastair Campbell, I always wonder how Marina Hyde feels about having to unironically do advert reads on The Rest is Entertainment.